Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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ORDINAlty

RESERVE P O L ICE BATTA LI O N 101 AND THE FINAL SOLUTION IN POLAND

Christopher R. Browning

PENGUIN BO O K S

PENGUIN

BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd. 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL. England Penguin Putnam Inc.• 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road. Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 382 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, em Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland. New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand. London WC2R ORL England www .penguin.com

First pubbshed In the USA by HruperCollins

1992

First published in Creat Britain in Penguin Books 2001

9

Copyright II) Christopher R.

Browning. 1992. 1998

All rights resf'lVed 'One Day in J6zef6w: I nitiation to Mass Murder'. a paper based on a portion of this work, has appeared in Peter Hayes. ed

.•

Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Cbicag o: Northwestern University

Press. 1991)

The moral right of the author has been asserted Printed in England by Clays L td. St lves pIc Except in the United States of America. this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade or other..vtse. be lent, re-sold. hin>d out. or otherwise ctrculated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or COYer other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

for Raul Hilberg

CONTENTS

Illustrations 1.

Preface ONE MORNING IN J6ZEF6w

ix

xiii

1

2. THE ORDER POLICE

3

3. THE ORDER POLICE AND THE FINAL SOLUTION: RUSSIA 1941

9

4. THE ORDER POLICE AND THE FINAL SOLUTION: DEPORTATION

26

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101

38

ARRIVAL IN POLAND

49

INITIATION TO MASS MURDER: THE J6ZEF6w MASSACRE

55

REFLECTIONS ON A MASSACRE

71

LOMAZY: THE DESCENT OF SECOND COMPANY

78 VII

vi ii I Contents

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

THE AUGUST DEPORTATIONS TO TREBLINKA LATE-SEPTEMBER SHOOTINGS

88

THE DEPORTATIONS RESUME

97 104

THE STRANGE HEALTH OF CAPTAIN HOFFMANN

114

THE "JEW HUNT"

121

THE LAST MASSACRES: "HARVEST FESTIVAL"

133

AFTERMATH

143

GERMANS, POLES, AND JEWS

147

ORDINARY MEN

15 9

Afterword

19 1

Shootings and Deportations by Reserve Police Battalion 101

Appendix:

225

Notes

227

Index

259

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

Poland in 1942-43 The Lublin District

x

xi

Photographs follow page 40

ix

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PREFACE

In mid-March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percent­ ages were exactly the reverse. At the core of the Holocaust was a short, intense wave of mass murder. The center of gravity of this mass murder was Poland, where in March 1942, despite two and a half years of terrible hardship, deprivation, and persecu­ tion, every major Jewish community was still intact, and where eleven months later only the remnants of Polish Jewry survived in a few rump ghettos and labor camps. In short, the German attack on the Jews of Poland was not a gradual or incremental program stretched over a long period of time, but a veritable blitzkrieg, a massive offensive requiring the mobilization of large numbers of shock troops. This offensive, moreover, came just when the German war effort in Russia hung in the balance-a time period that opened with the renewed German thrust xiii

xiv I Preface

toward the Crimea and the Caucasus and closed with the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad. H the German military offensive of 1942 was ultimately a failure, the blitzkrieg against the Jews, especially in Poland, was not. We have long known how the Jews in the major ghettos, especially Warsaw and L6dz, were murdered. But most Polish Jews lived in smaller cities and towns whose populations were often more than 30 percent Jewish, and in some ,cases even 80 or 90 percent. How had the Germans organized and carried out the destruction of this widespread Jewish population? And where had they found the manpower during this pivotal year of the war for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder? The personnel of the death camps was quite minimal. But the manpower needed to clear the smaller ghettos-to round up and either deport or shoot the bulk of Polish Jewry-was not. 1 My search for the answers to these questions led me to the town of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart. Here is located the Central Agency for the State Administrations of Justice (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen), the Federal Republic of Ger­ many's office for coordinating the investigation of Nazi crimes. I was working through their extensive collection of indictments and judgments for virtually every German trial of Nazi crimes committed against the Jews of Poland when I first encountered the indictment concerning Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police. Though I had been studying archival documents and court records of the Holocaust for nearly twenty years, the impact this indictment had upon me was singularly powerful and disturbing. Never before had I encountered the issue of choice so dramati­ cally framed by the course of events and so openly discussed by at least some of the perpetrators. Never before had I seen the monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human faces of the killers. It was immediately clear from the indictment, which contained quite extensive verbatim quotations from pretrial interrogations of battalion members, that the case was based upon an unusually

Preface / xv

rich collection of testimonies. Moreover, many of these testimo­ nies had a "feel" of candor and frankness conspicuously absent from the exculpatory, alibi-laden, and mendacious testimony so often encountered in such court records. The investigation and legal prosecution of Reserve Police Battalion 10 1 had been a decade-long process ( 1962 to 1972) conducted by the Office of the State Prosecutor (Staatsanwaltschaft) in Hamburg. This office-surely one of the most diligent and committed prosecu­ tors of Nazi crimes in all of the Federal Republic-still had custody of the court records relating to the case , and I success­ fully applied for permission to see them. Unlike so many of the Nazi killing units, whose membership can only be partially reconstructed, Reserve Police Battalion WI's roster was available to the investigators. As most of the men came from Hamburg and many still lived there at the time of the investigation, I was able to study the interrogations of 2 10 men from a unit consisting of slightly less than 500 when it was sent at full strength to Poland in June 1942 . This collection of interrogations provided a representative sample for statistical answers to questions about age, Party and SS membership, and social background. Moreover, about 125 of the testimonies were sufficiently substantive to permit both detailed narrative recon­ struction and analysis of the internal dynamics of this killing unit. Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became "professional killers. " The historian en­ counters numerous difficulties in trying to write about a unit of such men, among them the problem of sources. In the case of Reserve Police Battalion 10 1, in contrast to many of the killing units operating in the Soviet Union, there are few contemporary documents and none that deal explicitly with its killing activi­ ties.2 The accounts of a handful of Jewish survivors can establish the dates and magnitude of various actions in some of the towns where the battalion operated. But unlike survivor testimony about prominent perpetrators in the ghettos and camps, where

xvi I Preface

prolonged contact was possible, survivor testimony can tell us little about an itinerant unit like Reserve Police Battalion 101. Unknown men arrived, carried out their murderous task, and left. Seldom, in fact, can the survivors even remember the peculiar green uniforms of the Order Police to identify what kind of unit was involved. In writing about Reserve Police Battalion WI, therefore, I have depended heavily upon the judicial interrogations of some 125 men conducted in the 19605. To read about the same events experienced by a single unit as filtered through the memories of 125 different men more than twenty years after the fact is disconcerting to a historian looking for certainties. Each of these men played a different role. He saw and did different things. Each subsequently repressed or forgot certain aspects of the battalion's experiences, or reshaped his memory of them in a different way. Thus the interrogations inevitably present a confusing array of perspectives and memories. Paradoxically, I would have had the illusion of being more certain about what happened to the battalion with one detailed recollection instead of 125. Beyond the differing perspectives and memories, there is also the interference caused by the circumstances in which the testimony was given. Quite simply, some men deliberately lied, for they feared the judicial consequences of telling the truth as they remembered it. Not only repression and distortion but conscious mendacity shaped the accounts of the witnesses. Furthermore, the interrogators asked questions pertinent to their task of collecting evidence for specific, indictable crimes committed by particular people, but did not systematically investigate the broader, often more impressionistic and subjec­ tive facets of the policemen's experience that are important to the historian, if not to the lawyer. As with any use of multiple sources, the many accounts and perspectives had to be sifted and weighed. The reliability of each witness had to be assessed. Much of the testimony had to be

Preface I xvi i

partially or totally dismissed in favor of conflicting testimony that was accepted. Many of these judgments were both straightfor­ ward and obvious, but others were quite difficult. And as self-conscious as I have tried to be, at times I undoubtedly made purely instinctive judgments without even being aware of it. Other historians looking at the same materials would retell these events in somewhat different ways. In recent decades the historical profession in general has been increasingly concerned with writing history "from the bottom up," with reconstructing the experiences of the bulk of the population ignored in the history of high politics and high culture hitherto so dominant. In Germany in particular, this trend has culminated in the practice of AUtagsgeschichte-"the history of everyday life"-achieved through a "thick description" of the common experiences of ordinary people. When such an approach has been applied to the era of the Third Reich, however, some have criticized it as an evasion-a way to shift attention from the unparalleled horrors of the Nazi regime's genocidal policies to those mundane aspects of life that continued relatively undis­ turbed. Thus, the very attempt to write a case study or microhistory of a single battalion might seem undesirable to some. As a methodology, however, "the history of everyday life" is neutral. It becomes an evasion, an attempt to "normalize" the Third Reich, only if it fails to confront the degree to which the criminal policies of the regime inescapably permeated everyday existence under the Nazis. Particularly for the German occupiers stationed in the conquered lands of eastern Europe--literally tens of thousands of men from all walks of life--the mass-murder policies of the regime were not aberrational or exceptional events that scarcely ruffied the surface of everyday life. As the story of Reserve Police Battalion 10 1 demonstrates, mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal. Another possible objection to this kind of study concerns the

xvi iiI Preface

degree of empathy for the perpetrators that is inherent in trying to understand them. Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader-both were human-if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can . This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old cliches that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature. Shortly before his death at the hands of the Nazis, the French Jewish historian Marc Bloch wrote, "When all is said and done, a single word, 'understanding,' is the beacon light of our studies."3 It is in that spirit that I have tried to write this book. One condition placed upon my access to the judicial interro­ gations must be made clear. Regulations and laws for the protection of privacy have become increasingly restrictive in Germany, especially in the past decade. The state of Hamburg and its court records are no exception to this trend. Before receiving permission to see the court records of Reserve Police Battalion 10 1, therefore, I had to promise not to use the men's real names. The names of the battalion commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, and the three company commanders, Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann, Captain Julius Wohlauf, and Lieutenant Hartwig Gnade, appear in other documentation in archives outside Germany. I have used their real names, for in their cases there is no confidentiality to breach. However, I have used pseudonyms (designated at first occurrence by an asterisk) for all other battalion members who appear in the text of this book. The notes refer to those giving testimony simply by first name and

Preface I xix

last initial. While this promise of confidentiality and use of pseudonyms is, in my opinion, an unfortunate limitation on strict historical accuracy, I do not believe it undermines the integrity or primary usefulness of this study. A number of people and institutions provided indispensable support during the research and writing of this study. Oberstaats­ anwalt (Senior Prosecutor) Alfred Streim made available to me the incomparable collection of German judicial records in Lud­ wigsburg. Oberstaatsanwaltin Helge Grabitz encouraged me to work with the court records in Hamburg, supported my appli­ cation for access, and generously helped in every way during my stay there. Pacific Lutheran University provided me with finan­ cial awards for the two trips to German archives that initiated and concluded my research on this project. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation likewise aided one research visit in Germany. The bulk of the research and writing was completed during sabbatical leave from Pacific Lutheran University, and with the support of a Fulbright Research Grant to Israel. Daniel Krauskopf, executive secretary of the United States-Israel Ed­ ucational Foundation, deserves special thanks for facilitating my research in both Israel and Germany. Peter Hayes of Northwestem University and Saul Friedlander of UCLA offered opportunities to present initial research findings at conferences they organized at their respective institutions. Many friends and colleagues listened patiently, offered sugges­ tions, and provided encouragement along the way. Philip Nord­ quist, Dennis Martin, Audrey Euyler, Robert Hoyer, Ian Kershaw, Robert Gellately, Yehuda Bauer, Dinah Porat, Michael Marrus, Bettina Bim, George Mosse, Elisabeth Doman­ sky, Gitta Sereny, Carlo Ginzburg, and the late Uwe Adam deserve special mention. To Raul Hilberg lowe a special debt. In 1982 he called attention to the indispensability of the Order Police to the Final Solution, continuing as so often in.the past to set the agenda for further Holocaust research. " He then person­ ally interested himself in the publication of this study. For such

xx I Preface

help, both now and on earlier occasions in my career, the dedication of this book is an inadequate expression of my esteem and gratitude. For the continued support and understanding of my family, who have patiently endured the gestation period of another book, I am particularly grateful.

Tacoma, November

1991

1 One Morning in J6zej6w IN

THE VERY EARLY HOURS OF JULY 13, 1942, THE MEN OF

Reserve Police Battalion 101 were roused from their bunks in the large brick school building that served as their barracks in the Polish town of Bilgoraj. They were middle-aged family men of working- and lower-middle-class background from the city of Hamburg. Considered too old to be of use to the German army, they had been drafted instead into the Order Police. Most were raw recruits with no previous experience in German occupied territory. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks earlier. It was still quite dark as the men climbed into the waiting trucks. Each policeman had been given extra ammunition, and additional boxes had been loaded onto the trucks as well. 1 They 1

21 ORDINARY

MEN

were headed for their first major action, though the men had not yet been told what to expect. The convoy of battalion trucks moved out of Bilgoraj in the dark, heading eastward on a jarring washboard gravel road. The pace was slow, and it took an hour and a half to two hours to arrive at the destination-the village of J6zef6w-a mere thirty kilometers away. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the convoy halted outside J6zef6w. It was a typical Polish village of modest white houses with thatched straw roofs. Among its inhabitants were 1,800 Jews. The village was totally quiet.2 The men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 climbed down from their trucks and assembled in a half-circle around their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, a fifty-three-year-old career policeman affectionately known by his men as "Papa Trapp." The time had come for Trapp to address the men and inform them of the assignment the battalion had received. Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking, indeed it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities. If it would make their task any easier, the men should remember that in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children. He then turned to the matter at hand. The Jews had instigated the American boycott that had damaged Germany, one p0liceman remembered Trapp saying. There were Jews in the village of J6zef6w who were involved with the partisans, he explained according to two others. The battalion had now been ordered to round up these Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot on the spot by the battalion. Having explained what awaited his men, Trapp then made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. 3

2 The Order Police

How DID A BATTALION OF MIDDLE-AGED RESERVE POLICEMEN find themselves facing the task of shooting some 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of J6zef6w in the summer of 1942? Some background is needed, both on the institution of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo) and on its role in the Nazi policy of murdering the Jews of Europe. The Order Police resulted from the third attempt in interwar Germany to create large police formations with military training and equipment. 1 In the wake of the German defeat in World War I, revolution broke out in Germany. As the army dissolved, military officers and government officials fearful of being swept away by revolutionary forces organized counterrevolutionary param ilitary units known as the Freikorps. When the domestic 3

4 1 OR D I N ARY

ME N

situation stabilized in 1919, many of the Freikorps men were merged with regular police into large formations stationed in barracks and on hand to combat any further resurgence of the revolutionary threat. The Allies, however, demanded the disso­ lution of these police formations in 1920 as a potential violation of the clause of the Versailles Treaty limiting Germany's standing army to 100, 000 men. After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a "police army" (Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. These units were stationed in barracks and given full military training as part of Germany's covert rearmament. When Hitler openly defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty and reintroduced military conscription in 1935, the "police army" was merged into the rapidly enlarging regular army to prOVide cadres of commissioned and noncommissioned officers. The "police army" played no small role as a training ground for future army officers. As of 1942, no fewer than ninety-seven generals in the German army had previously served in the "police army" of 1933-35. 2 The preservation of large military formations within the police had to await the appointment of Heinrich Himmler, already head of the SS, as chief of German police in 1936, with jurisdiction over all police units in the Third Reich. Himmler divided the various German police into two branches, each under a main office in Berlin. Under the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) Main Office of Reinhard Heydrich were the notorious Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Ge­ stapo), to combat the regime's political enemies, and the Crim­ inal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), which was basically a detective force for nonpolitical crimes. The second branch of the police was the Order Police Main Office under Kurt Daluege. Daluege had charge of the city or municipal police (Schutz­ polizei, or Schupo), the rural police, equivalent perhaps to county troopers (Gendarmerie), and the small-town or commu­ nity police (Gemeindepolizei). By 1938 Daluege had over 62, 000 policemen under his

The Order Police / 5

jurisdiction. Nearly 9,000 of them were organized into police companies called Polizei-HundertschaJten of 108 men each. In each of ten cities in Germany, three police companies were brought together into yet larger "police training units" (Polizei­

Ausbildungsabteilungen).

In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as the increasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a further inducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new young policemen were exempted from conscription into the army. Moreover, because the police battalions-like U. S. National Guard units-were organized regionally, they seemed to offer the guarantee of completing one's alternative to regular military service not only more safely but closer to home. With the outbreak ofwar in September 1939, the Order Police bad reached a strength of 131,000 men. The big threat to its large military formations was, of course, absorption into the German army, a move avoided through a compromise for which the Order Police paid a heavy price. Many of its best units were furmed into a police division of nearly 16,000 men that was put at the disposal of the army. (It subsequently fought in the Ardennes in 1940 and took part in the attack on Leningrad in 1941, befure Himmler got it back in 1942 as the Fourth SS-Polizei Grenadier Division. ) Two police regiments raised in newly seized Danzig were also transferred to the army in October 1939. Finally, the Order Police provided over 8,000 men for the army's military police, or Feldgendarmerie. In return the other draft-age men of the Order Police remained exempt from military conscription. To replenish its ranks, the Order Police was allowed to recruit 26,000 young German men-9,000 volunteers born between 1918 and 1920, and 17,000 volunteers born between 1909 and 1912-as well as 6,000 so-called "ethnic Germans," or Volks­ deutsche, who had lived outside Germany prior to 1939. In addition, the Order Police received authorization to conscript 91,500 reservists born between 1901 and 1909-an age group not as yet subject to the military draft. Order Police conscription was

6 / ORDI N ARY

ME N

gradually extended to still older men, and by mid-I940, the size of the Order Police had grown to 244,500 .3 The Order Police had scarcely been taken into account in prewar mobilization plans, and little thought had been given to its possible wartime use, but Germany's military success and rapid expansion quickly created the need for more occupation forces behind the lines. With the outbreak of war, twenty-one police battalions of approximately 500 men each were formed from the various police companies and training units in Germany; thirteen of them were attached to the armies invading Poland. They were subsequently involved in rounding up Polish soldiers cut off behind the advancing lines, collecting weapons and military equipment abandoned by the retreating Poles, and providing other services to secure the rear areas. The number of police battalions rapidly expanded to 101 by mid-I940, as the 26,000 new young recruits and many of the older drafted reservists were formed into battalion units as well. Thirteen battalions were stationed in German-occupied central Poland, known as the General Government, and seven were stationed in the western Polish territories annexed to the Third Reich, the "incorporated territories. " Ten were stationed in the occupied Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, known as the Protectorate. In addition, six battalions were stationed in Nor­ way, and four in the Netherlands.4 The Order Police were quickly becoming an essential source of manpower for holding down German-occupied Europe. The new battalions were created in two ways. First, to provide the necessary cadres of noncommissioned officers, career police­ men and prewar volunteers from the initial battalions that went into Poland in 1939 were promoted and distributed to the newly formed units, whose ranks were filled with older drafted reserv­ ists. These battalions were designated "reserve police battal­ ions." Second, particular units (given numbers from 251 to 256 and 301 to 325) were formed from among the 26,000 young volunteers allocated to the Order Police in the fall of 1939. They

The Orde r Police 1 7

would become, in effect, the new elite fonnations of the Order s Police. The presence of the Order Police in the General Government was felt in two ways. First, in each of the four districts into which the General Government had been divided-Krak6w, Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw (a fifth, Galicia, was added in 1941}-a pennanent regimental commander (Kommandeur der Ordnungs­ polizei, or KdO) and staff were established. Each district regi­ ment was composed of three battalions that were constantly changing as they were rotated out from Gennany on tours of duty. Second, there was a thin network of smaller units of Order Police throughout the General Government. In each of the major Polish cities, a Schutzpolizei station was established. Its primary task was to supervise the Polish municipal police. In addition, there were thirty to forty small Gendarmerie posts in the medium-sized towns of each district. Both the Schutzpolizei and the Gendarmerie units, like the three battalion commanders, reported to the district commander of the Order Police, the KdO. By the end of 1942, the total strength of the Order Police in the General Government had reached 15,186 men. The Polish police under Order Police supervision numbered 14,297. 6 One chain of command led upward from the Order Police battalions, as well as from the network of smaller units, through the district KdO to the overall commander of the Order Police in the General Government (Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei, or BdO) in the capital city of Krak6w, and finally to Daluege's main office in Berlin. This was the nonnal chain of command for matters solely concerning the local Order Police units. However, there was a second chain of command for all policies and operations that involved the joint action of the Order Police with the Security Police and other SS units. In the General Govern­ ment, Heinrich Himmler had appointed a Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF), Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger, as his personal representative, with special responsibility to coordinate any actions involving more than one agency of Himmler's sprawling

8 / ORD I N ARY

ME N

SS and police empire. In each district in the General Govern­ ment, there was an SS and Police Leader (SSPF) who had the same responsibilities and powers on the district level that Kruger exercised for the General Government. For the district of Lublin, where Reserve Police Battalion 101 was stationed in 1942-43, the SSPF was the brutal and unsavory Odilo Globoc­ nik, a crony of Himmler's, who had been removed from his position as party chief in Austria for corruption. Thus Order Police units in the Lublin district could receive orders either from Daluege and the Berlin main office through the BdO in Krak6w and the district KdO, or from Himmler through the HSSPF, KrUger, and the district SSPF, Globocnik. As the murder of Polish Jewry was a program involving every branch of the SS and the police, it was the latter chain of command that would be crucial for Order Police participation in the Final Solution.

3 The Order Police and the Final Solution: Russia 1941 THE

INITIAL PARTICIPATION OF THE ORDER POLICE IN THE

Final Solution-the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry­ occurred not in Poland but in Russia in the summer and fall of 1941. In preparation for the invasion of Russia and the "war of destruction " Hitler intended to wage there, four special mobile units of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen were formed and trained in the late spring of 1941. The core of these units came from Heydrich's Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well as his intelligence apparatus (Security Service, or SD). They were supplemented by small units of Waffen-SS (the military branch of Himmler's SS). In addition, however, the three companies of Order Police Battalion 9 were distributed to three of the four Einsatzgruppen.1 Order Police members thus constituted about 9

1 0 1 OR D I N ARY

ME N

500 of the total of 3,000 men assigned to the four Einsatzgrup­ pen. The Einsatzgruppen were only the thin cutting edge of German units that became involved in political and racial mass murder in Russia. In early July a fifth ad hoc Einsatzgruppe made up of personnel from the Security Police in the General Government was sent into Russia. Most of these men became the permanent Security Police force in the areas of the 1939-41 Soviet occupation zone in former eastern Poland, while the original four Einsatzgruppen pressed deep into Russia behind the advancing German armies. For the occupation of Russia, Himmler had appointed three Higher SS and Police Leaders for the northern, central, and southern regions respectively. These men were in charge of coordinating all SS operations in occupied Russia. In the eu­ phoric day� of mid-July 1941, when ultimate victory seemed in sight after Germany's stupendous initial military successes, Hitler ordered the intensification of the pacification program behind the advancing German lines. On July 16 he announced that Germany would never withdraw from its newly won terri­ tories in the east; instead he would create there "a Garden of Eden," taking all necessary measures to accomplish this. It was fortunate that Stalin had given the order for partisan warfare, Hitler said, because "it gives us the opportunity to exterminate anyone who is hostile to us. Naturally the vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best through shooting anyone who even looks askance at US. "2 Himmler was not slow to respond to such exhortations from his master. Within a week, he had reinforced HSSPF Central Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and HSSPF South Friedrich Jeckeln with an additional SS brigade each, thus adding more than 11,000 men to the SS murder campaign.3 Moreover, at least eleven police battalions-nine of them 300-level and thus com­ posed of recent young volunteers-were distributed among the three HSSPFs in Russia, adding another 5,500 Order Police to

Ir: ":ffr,

- .. .,'

-£-.

The Order Po l i ce and the Fi nal Solu t i o n : Russia 1 941

/11

.

the 500 already assigned to the Einsatzgruppen.4 Between late July and mid-August, Himmler toured the eastern front, per­ sonally urging his men to carry out the mass murder of Russian

Jewry.

But the Order Police actually inaugurated their murderous c:areer in Russia before this massive buildup in the later part of July. The site was the nearly half-Jewish city of Biatystok. On the eve of the German invasion of Russia-dubbed Operation Barbarossa-Major Weis of Police Battalion 309 met with his company commanders. As in every other unit of the German army and police moving into Russia, he disclosed several orders that were to be passed on to the men verbally. The first was the notorious Kommissarbefehl, or "commissar order," according to which so-called political commissars-all Communist function­ aries in the army as well as those in the civil administration suspected of being in any way anti-German-were to be denied prisoner of war status and executed.5 The second order was the "Barbarossa decree," which removed the actions of German soldiers toward Russian civilians from the jurisdiction of military courts and explicitly approved collective reprisal against entire villages.6 It was, in fact, a "shooting license" against Russian civilians. Major Weis then went further. The war, he said, was a war against Jews and Bolsheviks, and he wanted it understood that the battalion should proceed ruthlessly against Jews. In his view, the meaning of the Fiihrer's orders was that the Jews, regardless of age or sex, were to be destroyed. 7 After entering the city of Bialystok, Major Weis on June 27 ordered his battalion to comb the Jewish quarter and seize male Jews, but he did not specify what was to be done with them. That was apparently left to the initiative of the company captains, who had been oriented to his way of thinking in the preinvasion meeting. The action began as a pogrom: beating, humiliation, beard burning, and shooting at will as the policemen drove Jews to the marketplace or synagogue. When several Jewish leaders {f appeared at the headquarters of the 221st Security Division of ,

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General pflugbeil and knelt at his feet, begging for army protection, one member of Police Battalion 309 unzipped his fly and urinated on them while the general turned his back. What started as a pogrom quickly escalated into more system­ atic mass murder. Jews collected at the marketplace were taken to a park, lined up against a wall, and shot. The killing lasted until dark. At the synagogue, where at least 700 Jews had been collected, gasoline was poured at the entryways. A grenade was tossed into the building, igniting a fire. Police shot anyone trying to escape. The fire spread to nearby houses in which Jews were hiding, and they too were burned alive., The next day, thirty wagonloads of corpses were taken to a mass grave. An estimated 2,000 to 2,200 Jews had been killed. When General Pflugbeil sent a messenger to Major Weis to inquire about the fire, the major was found drunk. He claimed to know nothing about what was happening. Weis and his officers subsequently submitted a false report of the events to PHugbeil. 8 If the first Order Police massacre of Jews in Bialystok, on June 27, was the work of an individual commander who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Fuhrer, the second, in mid-July, involved clear and systematic instigation from the very highest echelons of the SS-namely Erich von dem Bach­ Zelewski, Kurt Daluege, and Heinrich Himmler. Police Battal­ ion 309 moved eastward, and Police Battalions 316 and 322 entered Bialystok in its wake. The official daily record, or war diary (Kriegstagebuch), and various reports and orders of Police Battalion 322 are among the rare surviving Order Police docu­ ments that have reached the West from Soviet archives. They allow us to trace subsequent events in Bialystok. The preinvasion orientation of Police Battalion 322 was appar­ ently not as vicious as that of Police Battalion 309, but it was certainly not free of ideological exhortation. Major General Retzlaff delivered a farewell address to the battalion in Warsaw on June 10. Every member had to be careful, he advised, "to appear before the Slavic peoples as a master and show them that he was a German.'.g Before leaving for Russia on July 2, the men

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The Orde r Police ;,nd the Fin;,1 Solution: Russi;, 1 94 1 1 1 3 were

informed that any "political commissar was to be shot" and that they had to be "tough, determined, and ruthless," 1o The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days later was ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city , , , for Bolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of the Jewish quarter," allegedly for plunder seized by Jews before the German arrival. The German police in fact carried off twenty wagonloads of booty during the search. By July 8 the battalion ,had shot twenty-two people. "It was a matter . . . almost 1 exclusively of Jews. " 1 , On this same afternoon of the July 8 search, the battalion received a surprise visit from the Reichsfiihrer SS and chief of German police, Heinrich Himmler, and the commander of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege. The battalion commander, Major Nagel, was invited to the dinner given that evening by HSSPF Central, Bach-Zelewski, in Himmler's honor. The following morning Daluege held a review of the police battalions in Bialystok in Himmler's presence. In his speech Daluege empha­ sized that the Order Police "could be proud to be participating in the defeat of the world enemy, Bolshevism. No other campaign had the significance of the present one. Now Bolshe­ vism will finally be destroyed for the benefit of Germany, Europe, yes, the entire world. "12

Two days later, on July 11, Colonel Montua of the Police Regiment Center (which included Police Battalions 316 and 322) ' , issued the follOwing order: Confidential! 1. By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader, , , all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares. The graves are to be leveled in such a way that no pilgrimage site can arise. I forbid photographing and the permitting of

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M E N

spectators at the executions. Executions and grave sites are not to be made known.

2. The battalion and company commanders are especially to

provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this action. The impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings. Furthermore the men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures. 13 The war diary falls strangely silent about what happened in Bialystok following Montua's ordering of executions, but subse­ quent judicial proceedings in Germany unveiled the course of events.14 There was, of course, no investigation, trial, and conviction of so-called plunderers to be shot according to martial law. Male Jews who appeared to be between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were simply rounded up and brought to the stadium in Bialystok on July 12. When the stadium was nearly filled, Bach-Zelewski visited the site, and valuables were collected from the Jews. It was a very hot day, during which the Jews neither received water nor were allowed to go to the toilet. Beginning either the same day or the following morning, trucks from the motor pools of both police battalions began shuttling the Jews from the stadium to antitank ditches in a forested area outside the city. Most of Battalion 316 and one company of Battalion 322 guarded the shooting site and were formed into firing squads. Bach-Zelewski again appeared on the scene and gave a justifying speech. The shooting lasted until nightfall, and then the policemen attempted to carry on the executions under the headlights of their trucks. When this proved unsatisfactory, the action was broken off and completed the following day. The German courts concluded that at least 3,000 Jews had been shot (though it must be kept in mind that for judicial convenience such figures always represent an uncon­ tested minimal estimate of victims, and not the most probable number, so as to remove that issue from judicial dispute).

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The Order Pol ice a n d the F i n a l S o l uti o n : R u s s i a 1 94 1

115

'Ibe murder campaign against Russian Jewry accelerated in the late summer and fall of 1941, and the war diary of Police Jattalion 322 reveals its continuing involvement. On July 23 the battalion's formal subordination to the rear area army com­ mander was severed. "For the imminent tasks of the battalion, it is placed directly under the HSSPF Gruppenfiihrer von dem Bach. "15 As the three companies of Police Battalion 322 moved from Bialystok to Minsk during the month of August, Lieutenant Riebel's Third Company particularly distinguished itself by ongoing executions of Jews in its path. Following sweeps by the 'Ibird Company through the forest regions around Bial"owiei.a on August 2, the war diary noted, "Before departure 3d Company must carry out the liquidation of Jews. "16 Riebel subsequently reported, "In the early morning hours of August 10, the liquidation of the Jews lodged in the Bial"owiei.a prisoner collec­ tion camp was carried out by 3d Company. Seventy-seven male Jews between 16 and 45 were shot. The action was performed without incident. 'Ibere was not a single case of resistance. "17 'Ibis was not an isolated action, for five days later Riebel reported, "The Jewish action in Narevka-Mala was carried out by 3d Company on August 15, 1941. In it 259 women and 162 children were moved to Kobrin. All male persons between 16 and 65 years of age were shot. On August 15,- 1941, a total of one Pole for plundering and 232 Jews were shot. The Jewish execution was performed smoothly and without incident."18 By late August the battalion was in Minsk, where Bach­ . Zelewski and Daluege met on August 29. 19 As in Bialystok earlier, their meeting was the prelude to Order Police partici­ pation in another major mass shooting of Jews. On August 30 the battalion commander, Major Nagel, was summoned to discuss "a basic Jewish action" scheduled to take place on August . 31 and September 1. The battalion was to provide two compa­ nies.20 On August 31 the First and Third Companies of Police Battalion 322 (now designated the Seventh and Ninth Companies

1 6 1 OR D I N ARY

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of Police Regiment Center} moved into the Minsk ghetto, where they seized some 700 Jews, including 74 women. The following day Riebel's Ninth Company took part in the execution of more than 900 Jews, including all of those seized the day before. For this first shooting of large numbers of Jewish women, the author of the war diary felt the need to provide a justification. They were shot, he explained, "because they had been encountered without the Jewish star during the roundup . . . . Also in Minsk it has been discovered that especially Jewesses removed the marking from their clothing. "21 Ever anxious to get credit for his company's body count, Riebel dutifully reported, "In the Jewish action of September 1, the Jews seized on August 31 were shot. Shot by 9th Company were 290 men and 40 women. The executions proceeded smoothly. No one resisted. "22 In a subsequent action in Mogilev in early October, the need to explain the shooting of Jewish women was no longer felt. For October 2, the war diary recorded, "9th Company. From 3:30 p. m. the entire company. Jewish action in the ghetto of M{)gilev together with the staff of the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Central and Ukrainian auxiliary police: 2,208 Jews of both sexes seized, 65 shot on the spot attempting to escape. " On the follOwing day: "7th and 9th Companies together with the staff of the Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Central�xecution of a total of 2,208 Jews and Jewesses outside Mogilev not far from the forest camp (7th Company 378, 9th Company 545 shoot­ ings}."23 The involvement of the police battalions in the central region of Russia was not unique. The scant surviving documentation indicates similar involvement in both the south and the north. HSSPF Russia South, Friedrich Jeckeln, who commanded a total of five police battalions (304 and 320 in addition to Police Regiment South, consisting of 45, 303, and 314-thus, all but one of them composed of recent young volunteers), was careful in his cryptic daily reports to give credit where credit was due. The fonowing emerges from an incomplete collection of these reports. 24

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Order P o l i c e and the F i n a l S o l u t i o n : Rus s i a 1 94 1

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SEnEMBER 2: ' : SJ:pIEMBER 4: SEPTEMBER 6: ". kPIEMBER 11:

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117

Battalion 314 shot 25 Jews. Battalion 45 at Slavuta shot 522 Jews. Battalion 45 shot 66 and 471 Jews in two actions . Battalion 314 shot 367 Jews in a "cleansing action. " Battalion 314 shot 294 Jews, Battalion 45 shot 61 Jews, and the "police squadron" (horse-mounted police) 1 13 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 1,324 Jews. According to the first of two reports, Police Regiment South shot 549 Jews and Battalion 314 shot 69 Jews. The second credited Police Regiment South with shooting 914 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 369 Jews. Battalion 320 provided the "cordon" while the staff company of the HSSPF shot 15, 000 Jews at Kamenets Podolsky on August 26-27 and another 7,000 on August 28. Battalion 320 shot 2,200 Jews in Minkovtsy. Police Regiment South shot 88 Jews; Battalion 320 shot 380 . Police Regiment South shot 45 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 4, 144 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 144 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 1,548 Jews. Police Regiment South shot 1,255 Jews. Police Battalion 304 shot 305 Jews.

181 O R D I N A RY

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Postwar judicial interrogations in the Federal Republic of Gennany, stemming from this scant documentation, uncovered further infonnation about the murderous swath Police Battalions 45 and 314 cut across the Soviet Union in the fall of 1941. Police Battalion 45 had reached the Ukrainian town of Shepetovka on July 24, when its commander, Major Besser, was summoned by the head of Police Regiment South, Colonel Franz. Franz told Besser that by order of Himmler the Jews in Russia were to be destroyed and his Police Battalion 45 was to take part in this task. Within days the battalion had massacred the several hundred remaining Jews of Shepetovka, including women and children. Three-figure massacres in various Ukrainian towns followed in August. In September the battalion provided cordon, escort, and shooters for the execution of thousands of Jews in Berdichev and Vinnitsa. The battalion's brutal activities climaxed in Kiev on September 29 and 30, when the policemen again provided cordon, escort, and shooters for the murder of over 33,000 Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar. The battalion continued to carry out smaller executions (Khorol, Krementshug, Poltava) until the end of the year.25 Police Battalion 314 also began with relatively small three-figure massacres, starting on July 22. It then joined Police Battalion 45 in the execution of several thou5ruld Jews in Vinnitsa in September 1941, and shot 7,000 to 8,000 Jews in Dnepropetrovsk on October 10-14. The last shooting uncovered in the investigation dated to late January 1942 in Kharkov.26 The documentation from southern Russia provides a sketchy overview of the broad and continuous participation of Order Police units in the mass shootings of Jews, but it lacks detail; the documentation for northern Russia is just the opposite. Here we have no overview, but we do have one extraordinarily vivid description of an operation by Police Battalion 11, which had been stationed in the Kovno region since early July 1941, its Third Company charged with guarding the Kovno ghetto.27 In mid-October the battalion commander was sent to Minsk with two companies of Battalion 11 and two companies of Uthuanian auxiliary police. The operations officer of the 707th Security

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The Order Pol ice and the F i na l Solutio n : Russ i a 1 9 41

1 19

1jJ , �; i7 Division gave the policemen their first task {which they later 0: claimed to be the first of only two such actions}: the execution of ill Jews in the village of Smolevichi, east of Minsk, as an alleged '.

. ' deterrent and warning to the civilian population not to help the - partisans. The battalion commander claimed that he protested but was merely told by the operations officer and division �mmander that the German police could provide the cordon and leave the shooting to the Lithuanians. The massacre of the Smolevichi Jews was carried out as ordered. In late October the two companies of Order Police and their Lithuanian auxiliaries were ordered by the army to liquidate all the Jews in Slutsk, south of Minsk, a town of some 12,000 inhabitants, one-third Jewish. Again the measure was justified as a deterrent for the protection of German troops. What happened in Slutsk on October 27 was the subject of a report from the head of the German civil administration there to his boss, Wilhelm Kube, in Minsk. Regional Commissioner Slutsk To: General Commissioner in Minsk Concerning: Jewish action

Slutsk, 30 October

1941

In reference to my telephone report of October 27, 1941, I submit the follOwing to you in writing: On the morning of October 27 about 8 o'clock, a first lieutenant of Police Battalion 1 1 from Kovno (Lithuania) appeared. He introduced himself as the adjutant of the battalion commander of the Security [sic] Police. The first lieutenant declared that the police battalion had been assigned the task of carrying out the liquidation of all Jews in the city of Slutsk within two days. The battalion commander was ap­ proaching with a force of four companies, two of them Lithuanian auxiliaries, and the action had to begin immedi­ ately. I thereupon answered the first lieutenant that in any case I first of all had to discuss the action with the commander. About one-half hour later the police battalion arrived in

20 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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Slutsk. As requested, the discussion with the battalion com­ mander then took place immediately after his arrival. I explained first of all to the commander that it would s carcely be possible to carry out the action without prior preparation, because all [the Jews] had been sent to work and there would be frightful confusion. At the very least, he was obligated to give one day's notice. I then asked him to postpone the action for one day. He nonetheless rejected this, noting that he had to carry out actions in the cities all around and only two days were available for Slutsk. At the end of these two days Slutsk had to be absolutely free of Jews. I immediately lodged the sharpest protest against this, in which I emphasized that a liquidation of the Jews could not take place arbitrarily. The larger portion of Jews still present in the city consisted of craftsmen and their families. One simply could not do without the Jewish craftsmen, because they were indispensable for the maintenance of the economy. Furthermore I referred to the fact that White Russian craftsmen were, so to say, utterly unavailable, that therefure all vital enterprises would be paralyzed with a single blow if all Jews were liquidated. At the conclusion of our discussion I mentioned that the craftsmen and specialists, insofar as they were indispensable, had iden­ tification on hand, and that these Jews were not to be taken out of the workshops. It was further agreed that all Jews still in the city, especially the craftsmen's families, whom I also did not want to have liquidated, should first of all be brought to the ghetto for the purpose of sorting. Two of my officials were to be authorized to carry out the sorting. The commander in no way opposed my position, so in good faith I believed that the action would therefore be carried out accordingly. Several hours after the action began, the greatest difficulties were already becoming apparent. I discovered that the com­ mander was not at all abiding by our arrangement. Contrary to the agreement, all Jews without exception were being taken from the factories and workshops and sent off. A portion of the Jews were in any case taken through the ghetto, where many were grabbed and selected out by me, but most were loaded

The Order Pol ice and the F i n a l Solut i o n : R u s s i a 1 94 1

/ 21

directly on trucks and without further ado liquidated outside the city. Shortly after noon, complaints were already coming from all sides that the workshops could no longer operate because all Jewish craftsmen had been removed. Because the commander had driven on to Baranovichi, I contacted the deputy commander, a captain, after a long search and de­ manded that the action be immediately stopped, because it was not taking place according to my instructions and the economic damage already inflicted could not be made good. The captain was very astonished by my viewpoint and ex­ plained that he had received instructions from the commander to make the city free of Jews without exception, as they had also done in other cities. The cleansing had to take place on political grounds, and nowhere had economic factors so far played a role. Upon my energetic interventions he then nonetheless stopped the action toward evening. What else concerns this action, I must to my greatest regret emphasize, is last of all that it bordered on sadism. During the action the city itself offered a horrible picture. With indescrib­ able brutality, by the German policemen as well but especially by the Lithuanians, the Jews and also White Russians were taken out of their lodgings and driven together. There was shooting everywhere in the city, and in the individual streets bodies of Jews who had been shot piled up. The White Russians had the greatest difficulty in extricating themselves from the roundup. Aside from the fact that the Jews, among them also craftsmen, were brutally mistreated in a frightfully barbarous way before the eyes of the White Russians, the latter were likewise beaten with truncheons and clubs. One can no longer speak of a Jewish action, it appeared much more like a revolution. I and all my officials were in the midst of this all day without a break, in order to save what could still be saved. Repeatedly I literally had to drive German police officials as well as Lithuanians out of the workshops with drawn revolver. My own gendarmes were given the same task but because of the wild shooting often had to get off the streets in order not to be shot themselves. The entire scene was

22 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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altogether more than ghastly. In the afternoon a large number of horse-drawn carts without drivers stood around in the streets, so that I had to assign the city administration imme­ diately to take care of them. Afterward it turned out that they were Jewish wagons that had been assigned by the army to transport ammunition. The Jews had simply been taken down from the wagons and marched off, without anyone caring for the wagons. I was not present at the shootings outside the city. Thus I can say nothing about the brutality. But it suffices when I emphasize that long after being thrown in the grave, some of those shot worked their way out again. Concerning the economic damage I note that the tannery was most frightfully affected. Twenty-six experts worked there. In one blow fifteen of the best specialists among them were shot. Another four jumped from the wagons while underway and escaped, while seven avoided being seized through flight. Five men worked in the wheelwright shop, four of whom were shot, and the shop must now be kept going with only one wheelwright. Still other craftsmen are missing, such as cabinetmakers, smiths, etc. So far it has not been possible for me to get a precise overview. As I already mentioned at the beginning, the families of the craftsmen were also supposed to have been spared. Today it appears, however, that in almost every family some people are missing. Reports come in from everywhere, from which it can be concluded that in some such families the craftsman himself, in others the wife, and in yet others the children are missing. Thus almost all families have been tom apart. In these circumstances it must be very doubtful if the remaining craftsmen are enthusiastic about their work and produce accordingly, the more so in that at the moment they are still walking around with faces beaten bloody on account of the brutality. The White Russians, whose full trust had been won, stood there aghast. Although they are intimidated and do not dare to express their opinions freely, one nonetheless hears it said that this day represented no page of glory for Germany and that it will never be

The Order Po l i ce and the F i n a l Sol ution : Russia 1 94 1

1 23

forgotten. I am of the opinion that through this action much has been destroyed that we had achieved over the last months, and that it will be a long time before we can again win the trust of the population. In conclusion I find myself compelled to point out that during the action the police battalion plundered in an outra­ geous way, and indeed not only in Jewish houses, but just as much in the houses of the White Russians. They took with them anything useful, such as boots, leather, textiles, gold, and other valuables. According to the accounts of members of the army, watches were tom from the arms ofJews publicly in the streets, rings were pulled off fingers in the most brutal way. One senior paymaster reported that a Jewish girl was ordered by the police immediately to fetch 5, 000 rubles, then her father would be released. This girl is said to have run around everywhere trying to get the money. Also within the ghetto the individual barracks that were nailed shut by the civil administration and provided with a Jewish inventory were broken into and robbed by the police. Even in the barracks in which the unit was lodged, window frames and doors were tom out for the camp fire. Even though I had a talk with the commander's adjutant on Tuesday morning concern­ ing the plundering and he promised me in the course of the conversation that no police would henceforth enter the city, several hours later I was forced once again to arrest two fully armed Lithuanians, because they were caught looting. On the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, the battalion left the city in the direction of Baranovichi. The population was manifestly happy as the news spread through the city. So much for the report. I will come to Minsk in the near future in order once again to discuss the matter orally. At the moment I am not able to continue the Jewish action. First peace must return. I hope to be able to restore peace as quickly as possible and despite the difficulties to revive the economy. I now ask only that one request be granted me: "In the future spare me without fail from this police battalion." Carl28

24 l O R D I N A R Y

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Though the documentation of police battalion participation in the mass murder of Russian Jewry is not extensive, it does suffice to disprove beyond any reasonable doubt the chief postwar alibi of the Order Police leadership-namely, that Daluege had reached an agreement with Himmler whereby the Order Police would assist the Security Police, providing guard duty and any services short of shooting, but were forbidden to be the execu­ tioners themselves. This alibi, akin to the postwar claim of the Waf£en-SS that they were soldiers like any others and did not participate in the ideologically grounded programs of the rest of the SS, was successfully pleaded before at least one German court in the trial of Police Battalion 11. The defendants per­ suaded the court that after only two executions-upon army orders in the Minsk region-they were able to invoke Daluege's arrangement to secure their recall to Kovno.29 As the documentation shows, the direct participation of the Order Police in the mass executions of Russian Jews in the summer and fall of 1941 was pervasive, occurring within the jurisdictions of the northern, central, and southern HSSPFs as well as in Bialystok. Moreover, the mid-July massacre in Bialystok took place directly after Daluege and Himmler met there with Bach-Zelewski, and the September 1 massacre in Minsk occurred immediately after Daluege's visit with Bach­ Zelewski in that city. Clearly, Daluege was not forbidding but rather inciting Order Police participation in the mass murder. Order Police involvement in mass shootings in Russia after the fall of 1941 is not well documented and in all probability was much less frequent. The major exception was extensive Order Police participation in the shooting of Jews in the Pinsk region in the fall of 1942.30 In the military crisis of the 1941-42 winter, many police battalions were pressed into frontline duty. Others had to contend with growing partisan resistance. Moreover, the number of men recruited from native populations into auxiliary units under the Order Police increased nearly tenfold in 1942, from 33,000 to 300, 000. 31 There was a constant tendency to assign the actual shooting duties to these units, in order to shift

The Order Pol ice a n d the F i n a l Solution: Rus s i a 1 941

1 25

the psychological burden from the German police to their collaborators. This psychological burden was serious and ex­ tended even to Bach-Zelewski himself. Himmler's S S doctor, reporting to the Reichsruhrer on Bach-Zelewski's incapacitating illness in the spring of 1942, noted that the SS leader was suffering "especially from visions in connection with the shoot­ ings of Jews that he himself had led, and from other difficult experiences in the east. "32

4 The Order Police and the Final Solution: Deportation JUST AS TIlE ROLE OF THE ORDER POLICE IN THE MASSACRE OF

Russian Jewry was beginning to wind down in the fall of 1941, Daluege took on a new and vital assignment contributing to the Final Solution: guarding the deportation trains "to the east. " In late September 1941 Hitler approved the commencement of Jewish deportations from the Third Reich, to be organized by Reinhard Heydrich through his Jewish expert in Berlin, Adolf Eichmann, and the regional Security Police offices throughout Germany. 1 The only exceptions on the local level were in Vienna and Prague, where the deportations were to be handled by the Central Agencies for Jewish Emigration, created by Eichmann before the war and staffed by his handpicked men. Almost immediately, Heydrich reached agreement with Daluege on a 26

The Order Pol ice and the F i n a l Solut i o n : Deportation 1 27

division of labor. Daluege's Order Police would guard the transports that Heydrich's Security Police organized. Before each deportation wave, the local Order Police were instructed to accommodate Security Police requests for the agreed-upon transport guards. Ordinarily, the Order Police supplied one officer and fifteen men to each transport. 2 What was the scale of these operations? Between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1945, over 260 deportation trains took German, Austrian, and Czech Jews directly to the ghettos and death camps "in the east" (i.e. , Poland and Russia) or to the transit ghetto of Theresienstadt north of Prague and from there "to the east. "3 A minimum of 147 trains from Hungary, 87 from Holland, 76 from France, 63 from Slovakia, 27 from Belgium , 23 from Greece, 1 1 from Italy, 7 from Bulgaria, and 6 from Croatia-that is, close to 450 additional trains from western and southern Europe-were taken over by German guards at some point in their journey.4 No estimate has even been made of the number of Jewish deportation trains that traveled from Polish cities to the nearby death camps, but it was clearly in the many hundreds. Virtually all of these trains were guarded by Order Police. What did this mean in terms of what the Order Police experienced? One graphic report by Lieutenant Paul Salitter on guarding a deportation train from Dusseldorf to Riga on Decem­ ber 11, 1941, has already been published in both English and German. 5 Two other reports--on deportation trains from Vienna to Sobib6r and from Kolomyja in Galicia to Betzeo-are note­ worthy for an understanding of what numerous Order Police units did more than one thousand times during the war. First, the Vienna transport. Vienna, June 20, 1942 152d Police Precinct Report of Experiences Subject: Transport commando for the Jewish Transport Vienna-Aspangbahnhof to Sobib6r, June 14, 1942

28 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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The transport commando consisted of Reserve lieutenant Fischmann as leader, two sergeants, and 13 reserve policemen of the 1st Reserve Police Company East. The duty of the transport commando began at 11 a.m. on June 14, 1942, at the Aspangbahnhof, in accordance with the prior telephone re­ quest of SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Brunner. 1. The loading of the Jews: Under the direction and supervision of SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Brunner and SS-Hauptscharfiihrer Girzik of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, the loading of the Jews into the special train waiting in the Aspangbahnhof began at noon and went smoothly. The guard duty of the transport commando commenced at this time. A total of 1,000 Jews were deported. The transfer of the Jews as listed occurred at 4 p.m. Because of a shortage of cars, the transport commando had to make do with a third- instead of a second-class car.

2. Trip from Vienna to Sobib6r: The train Da 38 was dispatched from Vienna at 7:08 p.m. on June 14, 1942, and traveled to Sobib6r, not as scheduled to Izbica, via Lundenburg [Breclar] , Briinn [Bmo], Neisse [Nysa], Oppeln [Opole], Cz�stochowa, Kielce, Radom, D�b­ lin, Lublin, and Chelm. Arrival in Sobib6r on June 17, 1942, at 8:05 a. m. On arrival in Lublin at 9 p.m. on June 16, SS-Obersturmfiihrer Pohl was waiting for the train at the station and had 51 Jews capable of work between the ages of 15 and 50 removed from the train and taken to a work camp. At the same time he gave the order to take the remaining 949 Jews to the work camp in Sobib6r. Both lists of names, three wagons of baggage (with food supplies) as well as 100,000 zlotys were turned over to SS-Obersturmfiihrer Pohl in Lublin. At 11 p.m. the train departed from Lublin for Sobib6r. At the Jewish camp in Trawniki some 30 kilometers beyond Lublin the three baggage wagons and food supplies were surrendered to SS-Scharfiihrer Mayerhofer.

The Order Police and the F i n a l S o l ution : Deportation / 29

3. Delivery of the Jews in Sobib6r: At 8:15 a. m. on June 17 the train drove into the work camp

next to the Sobib6r train station, where the camp comman­ dant, First Lieutenant Stangl, took delivery of the 949 Jews. The unloading of the train cars began immediately and was completed by 9:15 a. m.

4. Trip from Sobib6r to Vienna: The return trip in the special train began about 10 a. m., immediately after the completion of the unloading of the Jews, from Sobib6r to Lublin, where we arrived at 2:30 a. m. on June 18. No travel expenses were paid for this train. The trip continued from Lublin at 8:13 a. m. on June 18 by regularly scheduled express train to Krak6w, where we arrived at 5:30 p.m. on the same day. In Krak6w we billeted with the Third Company of Reserve Police Battalion 74. On June 19 this company handed out one day's rations to each of the 16 men. From Krak6w the return trip was again continued on a regularly scheduled express train at 8:08 p. m. on June 19. Arrival in Vienna east train station at 6:30 a. m. on June 20. 5. The transport commando stopover in Krak6w:

The stopover of the transport commando in Krak6w lasted 26Y2 hours.

6. Crossing the border: The special train crossed the border between the Reich and the General Government on the outward journey on June 15 at 1:45 p.m., the regularly scheduled express train on the return trip at 12:15 a. m. on June 20. Provisions: The men of the transport commando were provided with cold rations for four days. This consisted of sausage, bread, mar­ malade, and butter, but was nonetheless not sufficient. In Krak6w the daily ration of the Third Company of Reserve Battalion 74 was good and sufficient. 7.

30 / 0 R D I N A R Y

ME N

Suggestions: In future it will be necessary to provide the men of the transport commando with marching rations, because the cold rations do not keep in the summer months. The sausage-it was a soft sausage-was already opened and cut up when handed out on June 15, and had to be consumed no later than the third day because of the danger of spoiling. On the fourth day the men had to be satisfied with marmalade, because the butter was also already rancid due to the tremendous heat in the train car. The size of the ration was also rather meager. 8.

9. Incidents:

No incidents occurred either on the outward journey, the stopovers in the train stations, or the return trip.

(signed) Fischmann Precinct Lieutenant of the Schutzpolizei6 The deportation of largely unsuspecting Viennese Jews, most of them elderly and/or female, passed with so little incident that Lieutenant Fischmann could concentrate on the hardships of a third- rather than second-class car, insufficient rations, and the summer heat that spoiled his butter. No mention, of course, was made of what the incarcerated Jews, without food or water, must have been suffering in the closed cattle cars during the sixty­ one-hour journey. But Fischmann was quite conscious, as he delivered 949 Jews to the alleged work camp in Sobib6r, that the Jews selected for work, the luggage, and the food supplies did not accompany them there. At Sobib6r the gas chambers were deep in the forest and not visible from the unloading ramp. But contrary to most Order Police denials, Fischmann and his commando apparently entered the camp and watched the un­ loading. The Order Police who guarded the deportation train from Kolomyja in Galicia found the experience considerably more trying than the incident-free transport from Vienna. Indeed, in

The Order Police a n d the F i n a l Solution: Deportation 1 3 1

Galicia, where the Jews had been subjected to open-air massacres in the summer and fall of 1941 and to a first wave of deportations in the spring of 1942, the resumption of deportations in August 1942 clearly no longer entailed an unknown fate for many of the victims. In mid-September 1942 an Order Police captain of Reserve Police Battalion 133 in Police Regiment 24 reported on the experiences of one week of deportation operations. 7. 1Pol. 24. Lemberg [Lw6w], September 14, 1942 To: Commander of the Order Police in the district of Galicia, Lemberg Subject: Jewish Resettlement After carrying out Jewish resettlement actions on the 3d and 5th of September in Skole, Stryj, and Khodorov, for which Captain of the Schutzpolizei Kropelin was in charge of the Order Police involved and which has already been reported in detail, the 7th Company of the 24th Police Regiment arrived as ordered in Kotomyja on the evening of September 6. I immediately contacted Kriminal Kommissar and SS­ Obersturmfiihrer Leitmaritz, head of the branch office of the Security Police in Kotomyja, and First Lieutenant Hertel of the Schutzpolizei station in Kotomyja. Contrary to the experience in Stryj, the action planned for September 7 in Kotomyja was well prepared and made easy for all units involved. The Jews had been informed by the above-mentioned agencies and the Labor Office to gather at the collection point of the Labor Office for registration on September 7 at 5:30 a.m. Some 5,300 Jews were actually assembled there at the appointed time. With all the manpower of my company, I sealed the Jewish quarter and searched thoroughly, whereby some 600 additional Jews were hunted down. The loading of the transport train was completed about 7 p.m. After the Security Police released some I�OOO from the

32 / 0 R 0 I N A R Y M E N tObl rounded up, 4,769 Jews were resettled. Each car of the transport was loaded with 100 Jews. The great heat prevailing that day made the entire action very difficult and greatly impeded the transport. After the regular nailing up and sealing of all cars, the transport train got underway to BeJzec about 9 p.m. with a guard of one officer and nine men. With the coming of deep darkness in the night, many Jews escaped by squeezing through the air holes after removing the barbed wire. While the guard was able to shoot many of them immediately, most of the escaping Jews were eliminated that night or the next day by the railroad guard or other police units. This transport was delivered in BeJzec without note­ worthy incident, although given the length of the train and the deep darkness, the guard had proved to be too weak, as the commander of the transport guard from 6th Company of Police Regiment 24, who returned directly to Stanislaw6w, was able to report to me in person on September 11. On September 8, some 300 Jews-old and weak, ill, frail, and no longer transportable-were executed. According to the order of September 4, of which I was first informed on September 6, concerning use of ammunition, 90% of all those executed were shot with carbines and rifles. Only in excep­ tional cases were pistols used. On September 8 and 10, actions in Kuty, Kosov, Horo­ denka, Zaplatov, and Sniatyn were carried out. Some 1,500 Jews had to be driven on foot marches 50 kilometers from Kuty or 35 kilometers from Kosov to KoI"omyja, where they were kept overnight in the courtyard of the Security Police prison with the other Jews brought together from the region. Other than the Jews rounded up in Horodenka and S niatyn, who had already been loaded onto ten cars at each location by the Security Police, another 30 cars were loaded in KoI"omyja. The total number sent to BeJzec on the resettlement train of September 10 amounted to 8,205. In the actions in the area around KoI"omyja on September 8 and 10, some 400 Jews had to be eliminated by shooting for the well-known reasons. In the great roundup of Jews

The Order Police and the F i n a l Solut i o n : Deportation 1 3 3

to be resettled by September 10 in Kolnmyja, the Security Police loaded all Jews into the 30 available train cars de­ spite the objections I expressed. Given the great heat prevailing on those days and the strain on the Jews from the long foot marches or from waiting for days without being given any provisions worth noting, the excessively great overloading of most of the cars with 180 to 200 Jews was catastrophic in a way that had tremendously adverse effects on the transport. How densely the ten cars each in Horodenka and S niatyn were loaded with Jews by the Security Police is beyond my knowledge. In any case, both transports arrived in KoI'omyja with completely inadequate guard, so that the barbed wire closing the air holes was almost entirely removed. As qUickly as possible I had this train moved out of the train station in KoI'omyja and coupled with the 30 cars standing on a side track far from the station. The Jewish police (Ordnungsdienst) and members of the train station construction crew from KoI'omyja were employed until the onset of darkness to close up all the insufficiently sealed cars in the usual regulation manner. A commando of one officer and fifteen men under the leadership of Captain Zitzmann was assigned to guard the parked resettlement train of 50 cars until departure and to prevent any escape attempt. Given the already described strains on the Jews, the negative effect of the heat, and the great overloading of most of the cars, the Jews attempted time and again to break out of the parked train cars, as darkness had already set in toward 7:30 p.m. At 7:50 p.m. the guard commando of the resettlement train, with nine men under Corporal Jiicklein, arrived at the side track. Breakout attempts from the parked train could not be prevented in the darkness, nor could the escaping Jews be shot in Hight. In all train cars the Jews had completely undressed because of the heat. As the train left KoI'omyja on schedule at 8:50 p. m . , the guard took up their stations. The guard commando, as initially stipulated by me, was divided into five men in. a passenger car

34 l O R 0 I N A R Y M E N ,,

I

i

at the front and five men in a passenger car at the end of the train. On account of the length of the train and its total load of 8,205 Jews, this distribution proved to be unsuitable. Next time Corporal J. will arrange a distribution of the guards along the entire train. Throughout the entire trip the policemen had to remain in the cabooses, in order to be able to counter the escape attempts of the Jews. Shortly into the journey the Jews attempted to break through the sides and even through the ceilings of certain train cars. They were partially successful in perpetrating this scheme, so that already five stations before Stanislaw6w, Corporal J. had to ask the stationmaster in Stanislaw6w by telephone to lay out nails and boards in order to seal the damaged cars as required by orders and to request the station guard to watch the train. As the train entered Stanislaw6w, the train station workers and the station guards were present to carry out the necessary repairs and in addition take over guarding the train. The work took one and one-half hours. When the train subsequently resumed its journey, it was discovered at the next stop some stations later that once again large holes had been broken by the Jews in some of the train cars and that for the most part the barbed wire fastened on the outside of the ventilation windows had been tom off. In one train car the Jews had even been working with hammer and saw. Upon interrogation they explained that the Security Police had left these tools with them, because they could make good use of them at their next work place. Corporal J. made the Jews hand over the tools. During the further journey, at every station stop, help was needed to nail up the train, because otherwise the rest of the trip would not have been at all possible. At 11:15 a. m. the train reached Lemberg. Because no relief for the escort commando arrived, the escort com­ mando J. had to continue guarding the train until BeI:iec. After a brief halt at the Lemberg train station, the train continued to the suburban station of Klaporov, where nine train cars marked with the letter "L" and destined for the

�

The Order P o l i c e and the F i na l Solution: Deportation 1 35

".

labor camp were turned over to SS-Oberstunnfiihrer Schulze and unloaded. SS-Oberstunnfiihrer Schulze then had some additional 1,000 Jews loaded. About 1:30 p.m. the transport departed for Benec. With the change of engine in Lemberg, such an old engine was hooked up that further travel was possible only with continuous interruptions. The slow journey was time and again used by the strongest Jews to press themselves through the holes they had forced open and to seek their safety in flight, because in jumping from the slow-moving train they were scarcely injured. Despite the repeated requests to the engineer to go faster, this was not possible, so that the frequent stops on open stretches became increasingly un­ pleasant. Shortly beyond Lemberg the commando had already shot off the ammunition they had with them and also used up a further 200 rounds that they had received from army soldiers, so that for the rest of the journey they had to resort to stones while the train was moving and to fixed bayonets when the train was stopped. The ever greater panic spreading among the Jews due to the great heat, overloading of the train cars, and stink of dead bodies-when unloading the train cars some 2,000 Jews were found dead in the train-made the transport almost unwork­ able. At 6:45 p.m. the transport arrived in Benec, and around 7:30 p.m. was turned over by Corporal J. to the SS­ Oberstunnfiihrer and head of the camp there. Until the unloading of the transport around 10 p . m . , J. had to remain in the camp, while the escort commando was used to guard the train cars parked outside the camp. Because of the special circumstances described, the number of Jews who escaped from this transport cannot be specified. Nonetheless, it can be assumed that at least two-thirds of the escaping Jews were shot or rendered hannless in some other way. In the actions themselves for the period of September 7-10, 1942, no special incidents occurred. The cooperation between

36 l OR 0 INARY

MEN

the Security Police and the Order Police units involved good and without friction.

was

(signed) Westermann Reserve Lieutenant of the Schutzpolizei and Company Commander7 This document demonstrates many things: the desperate attempts of the deported Jews to escape the death train; the scanty manpower employed by the Germans (a mere 10 men to guard over 8,000 Jews); the unimaginably terrible conditions­ forced marches over many miles, terrible heat, days without food and water, the packing of 200 Jews into each train car, etc.-that led to fully 25 percent of the deported Jews dying on the train from suffocation, heat prostration, and exhaustion (to say nothing of those killed in the shooting, which was so constant that the guards expended their entire ammunition supply as well as replenishment); the casual mention that even befure the depor­ tations hundreds of Jews judged too old, frail, or sick to get to the train were routinely shot in each action. Moreover, the docu­ ment makes clear that this action was only one among many in which members of Reserve Police Battalion 133 participated alongside the Security Police in Galicia during the late summer of 1942. Such documents, however, do not tell us much that we would like to know about the "grass-roots" perpetrators of the Final Solution. These men were not desk murderers who could take refuge in distance, routine, and bureaucratic euphemisms that veiled the reality of mass murder. These men saw their victims face to face. Their comrades had already shot all the Jews deemed too weak to be deported, and they subsequently worked viciously fur hours to prevent their victims from escaping the train and hence the gas chambers awaiting them in Bel'Zec. No one partic­ ipating in the events described in this report could have had the slightest doubt about what he was involved in, namely a mass murder program to exterminate the Jews of Galicia.

The Ord e r Police and the Final Solution: Depo rtation / 3 7

But how did these men first become mass murderers? What happened in the unit when they first killed? What choices, if any, did they have, and how did they respond? What happened to the men as the killing stretched on week after week, month after month? Documents like the one on the Kolomyja transport give us a vivid snapshot of a single incident, but they do not reveal the personal dynamics of how a group of normal middle­ aged German men became mass murderers. For that we must return to the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101.

5 Reserve Police Battalion 101 WHEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND IN SEPTEMBER 1939, POLICE

Battalion 101, based in Hamburg, was one of the initial battalions attached to a German army group and sent to Poland. Crossing the border from Oppeln in Silesia, the battalion passed through C�stochowa to the Polish city of Kielce. There it was involved in rounding up Polish soldiers and military equipment behind German lines and guarding a prisoner of war camp. On Decem­ ber 17, 1939, the battalion returned to Hamburg, where about a hundred of its career policemen were transferred to form additional units. They were replaced by middle-aged reservists drafted in the fall of 1939. 1 In May 1940, after a period of training, the battalion was

38

Reserve Pol ice Batta l i o n 1 0 1

1 39

dispatched from Hamburg to the Warthegau, one of the four regions in western Poland annexed to the Third Reich as the incorporated territories. Stationed first in Poznan (Posen) until late June, and then in L6dz (renamed Litzmannstadt by the victorious Germans), it carried out "resettlement actions" for a period of five months. As part of a demographic scheme of Hitler and Himmler's to "germanize" these newly annexed regions, that is, to populate them with "racially pure" Germans, all Poles and other so-called undesirables-Jews and Gypsies-were to be expelled from the incorporated territories into central Poland. In accordance with provisions of an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, ethnic Germans living in Soviet territory were to be repatriated and resettled in the recently evacuated farms and apartments of the expelled Poles. The "racial purifi­ cation" of the incorporated territories desired by Hitler and Himmler was never achieved, but hundreds of thousands of people were shoved around like so many pieces on a chessboard in pursuit of their vision of a racially reorganized eastern Europe. The battalion's summary report boasted of its zealous partici­ pation in the "resettlement": In actions night and day without pause, 100% of the batta­ lion's strength was employed in all of the districts of the Warthegau. On the average some 350 Polish peasant families were evacuated daily. . . . During the peak of the evacua­ tion period they [the men of the battalion] could not return to quarters for eight days and nights. The men had the opportunity to sleep only while traveling at night by truck. . . . In the biggest action, the battalion evacuated about 900 families . . . on one day with only its own forces and 10 translators. In all the battalion evacuated 36,972 people out of a tar­ geted 58,628. About 22,000 people escaped the evacuations by fleeing. 2

40 / 0 R 0 I N A R Y

M E N

One drafted reservist, Bruno Probst, * recalled the battalion's role in these actions. In the resettlement of the native population, primarily in the small villages, I experienced the first excesses and killings. It was always thus, that with our arrival in the villages, the resettlement commission was already there. . . . This so­ called resettlement commission consisted of members of the black [-uniformed] SS and SD as well as civilians. From them we received cards with numbers . The houses of the village were also designated with the same numbers. The cards handed to us designated the houses that we were to evacuate. During the early period we endeavored to fetch all people out of the houses, without regard for whether they were old, sick, or small children. The commission qUickly found fault with our procedures. They objected that we struggled under the burden of the old and sick. To be precise, they did not initially give us the order to shoot them on the spot, rather they contented themselves with making it clear to us that nothing could be done with such people. In two cases I remember that such people were shot at the collection point. In the first case it was an old man and in the second case an old woman. . . . both persons were shot not by the men but by noncommis­ sioned officers. 3 Others in the battalion also remembered the resettlement actions, but no one else remembered or admitted to such violence.4 One policeman did recall that the battalion had prOVided the Security Police with firing squads for the execution of 100 to 120 Poles during its stay in Poznan. 5 Following its five-month resettlement campaign, the battalion carried out "pacification actions." Combing villages and woods, they caught 750 Poles who had evaded the earlier evacuations. *

Pseudonyms are deSignated throughout by

an

asterisk at first occurrence.

»

The Mi�zyrzec "transit" ghetto, liquidated in a series of seven "actions" between August 1942 and July 1943. Lieutenant Gnade's Second Company referred to Mi�dzyrzec by the apt German nickname Menschenschreck, or "human horror."

(Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw)

.'. .•.

�

" -, .,,-

• ... ·NIA .u .... . ,

THE LUBLIN DISTRICT

e Treblinka

0------ 20 miles

P

O

L

A

N

D

e Siedlce Mi¢Zyrzec e Lukow e

Biala Podlaska e

Lomazy e Komarowka e e Radzyii

Serokomlae

Piszczac e Tuczna e

eWisznice

Czemiemiki e e Parczew e Kock

----

Parczew Forest

Sobib6r e

e K06skowola e Pulawy

Niezd6we

e Poniatowa

Chehn e

Piaskie

Krasnik e

eWysokie

e lzbica

Tur obin e

eZamosc Frampole

� lan6w

Bilgoraje Aleksandr6w e Tamogr6d e

e J 6zef6w

In most deportations, the Jews were instructed to take a few personal belongings with them, to give credence to the cover story of resettlement. Lieutenant Gnade's strip search was a clear sign that no one, neither policemen nor Jews, believed in this pretense any longer. (Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw)

After the strip search, the Jews were allowed to put their underclothes back on before being marched to the train station and packed into cattle cars. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)

At the "undressing barracks"-a stage in the deportation process first introduced by Lieutenant Gnade in the fall of 1942, when the Mi�dzyrzec ghetto was subjected to a particularly brutal series of "clearing operations"-Order Police forced the Jews to strip and searched them for valuables. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)

.

Order Police march the Mi�dzyrzec Jews through town,

May 26, 1943. The Jews deported to Majdanek that day would perish in the

Ernte/est massacre of November 1943.

Luk6w, probably in the fall of

l�,.. n � r1 ..,..n.,.1 fha.

rn l'l i Y'l

1942, when the Order Police

...he>Hn th,prp frn"

,.

p

Lieutenant Gnade in front of his "undressing barracks" in M if;dzyrzec.

(Courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Order Police stand guard in the marketplace during the "sixth action," May 26, 1943, when 1,000 Jews were deported to the labor camp at Majdanek. In earlier Mi�dzyrzec deportations, the Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers of Treblinka. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Reserve Police Batta l ion 1 0 1 1 41

Their task Was made more difficult because even the newly arrived ethnic Germans did not always report the unauthorized presence of the Poles they had displaced, wishing to avail themselves of cheap labor. 6 On November 28, 1940, the battalion took up guard duty around the L6dz ghetto, which had been sealed seven months earlier, at the end of April 1940, when the 160, 000 Jews of L6di were cut off from the rest of the city by a barbed wire fence. Guarding the ghetto now became the major duty of Police Battalion 101, which had a standing order to shoot "without further ado" any Jew who ignored the posted warnings and came too close to the fence. This order was obeyed. 7 None of Battalion WI's men, however, remembered excesses such as occurred while the First Company of Police Battalion 61 was guarding the Warsaw ghetto. There the company captain openly encouraged shooting at the ghetto wall. The most notorious shooters were not rotated to other duties but were kept permanently on ghetto guard duty. The company recreation room was decorated with racist slogans, and a Star of David hung above the bar. A mark was made on the bar door for each Jew shot, and "victory celebrations" were reportedly held on days when high scores were recorded. 8 Stationed outside the ghetto wire, the battalion members had more contact with the non-Jewish population than with the incarcerated Jews. Bruno Probst recalled that the guards on the thoroughfare that cut between the two halves of the L6di ghetto occasionally amused themselves by setting their watches ahead as a pretext for seizing and beating Poles who were allegedly violating the curfew. He also recalled that drunken guards, intending to kill a Pole on New Year's eve, shot an ethnic German by mistake and covered it up by switching the victim's 9 identity card. In May 1941 the battalion returned to Hamburg and was "practically dissolved. " All remaining prewar recruits beneath the rank of noncommissioned officer were distributed to other

42 l O R 0 I N A R Y M E N units, and the ranks were filled with drafted reservists. The battalion had become, in the words of one policeman, a "pure "10 reserve battalion. During the next year, from May 1941 to June 1942, the battalion was reformed and underwent extensive training. Only a few incidents from this period remained in the memories of the men. One was the bombing of Lubeck in March 1942, for units of the battalion were sent to the damaged city immediately afterward. 11 Another involved the deportation of Hamburg Jews. From mid-October 1941 to late February 1942, 59 transports carried more than 53,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies from the Third Reich "to the east," in this case L6dz, Riga, Kovno (Kaunas), and Minsk. The five transports to Kovno and the first transport to Riga were massacred upon arrival. 12 The remaining transports were not "liquidated" imJll ediately. Rather the deportees were initially incarcerated in the ghettos of L6dz (where the 5,000 Austrian Gypsies were sent), Minsk, and Riga. Four such transports that were spared immediate death came from Hamburg. The first, with 1,034 Jews, departed on October 25, 1941, for L6dz. The second, with 990 Jews, left for Minsk on November 8. The third, with 408 Jews from Hamburg and 500 from Bremen, left for Minsk on November 18. The fourth left Hamburg for Riga with 808 Jews on December 4. 13 Men from Reserve Police Battalion 101 were involved in various phases of the Hamburg deportations. The collection point for the deportations was the Freemason lodge house on the Moorweide, which had been confiscated by the Security Police. Flanked by the university library and an apartment block, within several hundred yards of the heavily used Dammtor train station, the collection point was scarcely an inconspicuous location out of the sight of Hamburg citizens. Some Order Police of Battalion 101 proVided guard duty at the Freemason lodge house, where the Jews were collected, registered, and loaded on trucks to the Stemschanze train station. 14 Other men of Battalion 101 guarded the station, where the Jews were loaded onto the trains. 15 And finally, Battalion 101 provided the escort for at least

Reserve Pol i c e Batta l i o n 1 0 1

1 43

three of the four transports--the first, on October 25, to L6dz; the second, on November 8, to Minsk; and the last, on December 4, to Riga. 16 According to Hans Keller, * escort duty on the Jewish transports was "highly coveted" because of the chance to travel, and was assigned only to a "favored" few. 17 Bruno Probst, who accompanied the November 8 transport to Minsk, recalled: In Hamburg the Jews were told at the time that they would be allocated a whole new settlement territory in the east. The Jews were loaded into normal passenger cars . . . accompanied by two cars of tools, shovels, axes, etc. , as well as large kitchen equipment. For the escort commando a second-class carriage was attached. There were no guards in the cars of the Jews themselves. The train had to be guarded on both sides only at stops. After about four days' journey we reached Minsk in the late afternoon. We learned of this destination for the first time only during the journey, after we had already passed Warsaw. In Minsk an SS commando was waiting for our transport. Again without guard, the Jews were then loaded onto the waiting trucks. Only their baggage, which they had been allowed to bring from Hamburg, had to be left behind in the train. They were told it would follow. Then our commando was finally driven to a Russian barracks, in which an active [i. e . , not reserve] German police battalion was lodged. There was a Jewish camp nearby . . . . From conversations with members of the above-mentioned police battalion we learned that some weeks ago this unit had already shot Jews in Minsk. We concluded from this fact that our Hamburg Jews were to be shot there also. Not wanting to be involved, the escort's commander, Lieutenant H artwig Gnade, did not remain at the barracks. Instead he and his men returned to the station and took a late-night train out of IS Minsk We have no description of the escort duty to Riga from Hamburg, but the Salitter report on the Order Police escort of

44 l O R 0 I N A R Y

MEN

the December 1 1 Jewish transport from Dusseldorf to Riga provides graphic evidence that policemen there learned as much as the Hamburg policemen did in Minsk. As Salitter noted: Riga consisted of some 360,000 inhabitants, including some 35,000 Jews. The Jews were everywhere dominant in the business world. Their businesses were nonetheless immedi­ ately closed and confiscated after the entry of German troops. The Jews themselves were lodged in a ghetto on the Duna [Dvina] that was sealed by barbed wire. At the moment only 2,500 male Jews who are used for labor are said to be in the ghetto. The other Jews have either been sent to similar employment elsewhere or shot by the Latvians. . . . They [the Latvians] hate the Jews in particular. From the time of liberation to the present, they have participated very amply in the extermination of these parasites. It is, however, incomprehensible to them, as I was especially able to discover from Latvian railway personnel, why the Germans bring their Jews to Latvia instead of exterminating them in their own country. l9 In J une 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 wa61 For his first victim August Zorn· was given a very old man. Zorn recalled that his elderly victim could not or would not keep up with his countrymen, because he repeatedly fell and then simply lay there. I regularly had to lift him up and drag him forward. Thus, I only reached the execution site when my comrades had already shot their Jews. At the sight of his countrymen who had been shot, my Jew threw himself on the ground and remained lying there. I then cocked my carbine and shot him through the back of the head. Because I was already very upset from the cruel treatment of the Jews during the clearing of the town and was completely

I n it i a tion to Mass Murder: The J6zef6w Massacre 1 6 7

in tunnoil, I shot too high. The entire back of the skull of my Jew was tom off and the brain exposed. Parts of the skull flew into Sergeant Steinmetz's face. This was grounds for me, after returning to the truck, to go to the first sergeant and ask for my release. I had become so sick that I simply couldn't 62 anymore. I was then relieved by the first sergeant. Georg Kageler, * a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, made it through the first round before encountering difficulty. "After I had carried out the first shooting and at the unloading point was allotted a mother with daughter as victims for the next shooting,

I began a conversation with them and learned that they were Germans from Kassel, and I took the decision not to participate further in the executions. The entire business was now so repugnant to me that I returned to my platoon leader and told him that I was still sick and asked for my release. " Kageler was sent to guard the marketplace. 63 Neither his pre-execution conversation with his victim nor his discovery that there were German Jews in J6zef6w was unique. Schimke, the man who had first stepped out, encountered a Jew from Hamburg in the marketplace, as did a second policeman.64 Yet another po­ liceman remembered that the first Jew he shot was a decorated World War I veteran from Bremen who begged in vain for mercy. 65 Franz Kastenbaum, * who during his official interrogation had denied remembering anything about the killing of Jews in Poland, suddenly appeared uninvited at the office of the Ham­ burg state prosecutor investigating Reserve Police Battalion 101. He told how he had been a member of a firing squad of seven or eight men that had taken its victims into the woods and shot them in the neck at point-blank range. This procedure had been repeated until the fourth victim. The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and ran away from the ,

68 / 0 R 0 I N A R Y

MEN

shooting site. 1 have expressed myself incorrectly just now. It was not that 1 could no longer aim accurately, rather that the fourth time I intentionally missed. 1 then ran into the woods, vomited, and sat down against a tree. To make sure that no one was nearby, 1 called loudly into the woods, because 1 wanted to be alone. Today I can say that my nerves were totally finished. 1 think that 1 remained alone in the woods for some two to three hours. Kastenbaum then returned to the edge of the woods and rode an empty truck back to the marketplace. He suffered no conse­ quences; his absence had gone unnoticed because the firing squads had been all mixed up and randomly assigned. He had come to make this statement, he explained to the investigating attorney, because he had had no peace since attempting to conceal the shooting action. 66 Most of those who found the shooting impossible to bear quit very early.67 But not always. The men in one squad had already shot ten to twenty Jews each when they finally asked to be relieved. As one of them explained, "I especially asked to be relieved because the man next to me shot so impossibly. Apparently he always aimed his gun too high, producing terrible wounds in his victims. In many cases the entire backs of victims' heads were tom off, so that the brains sprayed all over. I simply couldn't watch it any longer. ''66 At the unloading point, Sergeant Bentheim watched men emerge from the woods covered with blood and brains, morale shaken and nerves finished. Those who asked to be relieved he advised to "slink away" to the market­ place.69 As a result, the number of policemen gathered on the marketplace grew constantly. 70 As with First Company, alcohol was made available to the policemen under Drucker and Steinmetz who stayed in the forest and continued shooting.71 As darkness approached at the end of a long summer day and the murderous task was still not finished, the shooting became even less organized and more hectic. 72 The forest was so full of dead bodies that it was difficult to find places

I n i t iation to Mass Murder: T h e J6zef6w Massacre 1 69

to make the Jews lie down. 73 When darkness finally fell about 9:00 p.m.-some seventeen hours after Reserve Police Battalion 101 had first arrived on the outskirts ofJ6zef6w-and the last Jews had been killed, the men returned to the marketplace and prepared to depart for Bilgoraj . 74 No plans had been made for the burial of the bodies, and the dead Jews were simply left lying in the woods. Neither clothing nor valuables had been officially collected, though at least some of the policemen had enriched themselves with watches, jewelry, and money taken from the victims. 7s The pile of luggage the Jews had been forced to leave at the market­ place was simply burned. 76 Before the policemen climbed into their trucks and left J6zef6w, a ten-year-old girl appeared, bleed­ ing from the head. She was brought to Trapp, who took her in his arms and said, "You shall remain alive. "77 When the men arrived at the barracks in Bilgoraj, they were depressed, angered, embittered, and shaken. 78 They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk. Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again placing the responsibility on higher authorities. 79 But neither the drink nor Trapp's consolation could wash away the sense of shame and horror that pervaded the barracks. Trapp asked the men not to talk about it,80 but they needed no encouragement in that direction. Those who had not been in the forest did not want to learn more.8 1 Those who had been there likewise had no desire to speak, either then or later. By silent consensus within Reserve Police Battalion 101, the J6zef6w massacre was simply not discussed. "The entire matter was a taboo. "82 But repression during waking hours could not stop the nightmares. During the first night back from J6zef6w, one policeman awoke firing his gun into the ceiling of the barracks. 83 Several days after J6zef6w the battalion, it would seem, narrowly missed participation in yet another massacre. Units of First and Second Company, under Trapp and Wohlauf, entered Alekzandr6w-a so-called street village composed of houses strung out along the road twelve kilometers west of J6zef6w. A .

'(

.

• '

70 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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small number of Jews was rounded up, and both the policemen and the Jews feared that another massacre was imminent. After some hesitation, however, the action was broken off, and Trapp pennitted the Jews to return to their houses. One policeman remembered vividly "how individual Jews fell on their knees before Trapp and tried to kiss his hands and feet. Trapp, however, did not permit this and turned away." The policemen returned to BHgoraj with no explanation for the strange turn of events.84 Then, on July 20, precisely one month after its departure from Hamburg and one week after the J6zef6w massacre, Reserve Police Battalion 101 left BHgoraj for redeploy­ ment in the northern sector of the Lublin district.

8 Reflections on a Massacre AT J6ZEF6w

A

MERE DOZEN MEN

OUT OF NEARLY 500 HAD

responded instinctively to Major Trapp's offer to step forward and excuse themselves from the impending mass murder. Why was the number of men who from the beginning declared themselves unwilling to shoot so small? In part, it was a matter of the suddenness. There was no forewarning or time to think, as the men were totally "surprised" by the J6zef6w action. 1 Unless they were able to react to Trapp's offer on the spur of the moment, this first opportunity was lost. 2 As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity-the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out. The battalion had only recently 71

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been brought up to full strength, and many of the men did not yet know each other well; the bonds of military comradeship were not yet fully developed. Nonetheless, the act of stepping out that morning in J6zef6w meant leaving one's comrades and admitting that one was "too weak" or "cowardly. " Who would have "dared," one policeman declared emphatically, to "lose face" before the assembled troops. 3 "IT the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place, " said another who subsequently asked to be excused after several rounds of killing, "I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward. " It was one thing to refuse at the beginning, he added, and quite another to try to shoot but not be able to continue. 4 Another policeman-more aware of what truly required courage-said quite simply, "I was cowardly."5 Most of the interrogated policemen denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, many did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but claimed that they had not heard that part of the speech or could not remember it. A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942. Quite atypical in describing his state of mind that morning of July 13 was a policeman who admitted to killing as many as twenty Jews before quitting. "I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway . . . . Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn't reSect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then. . . . Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right. "6 In addition to the easy rationalization that not taking part in the shooting was not going to alter the fate of the Jews in any case, the policemen developed other justifications for their behavior. Perhaps the most astonishing rationalization of all was that of a thirty-five-year-old metalworker from Bremerhaven:

Reflections on a Massacre 1 7 3

I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, ,soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their • � mothers.7 The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for "release" (erlosen) also means to "redeem" or "save" when used in a religious sense. The one who "releases " is the Erloser-the Savior or Redeemer! In terms of motivation and cOnsciousness, the most glaring omission in the interrogations is any discussion of anti-Semitism. For the most part the interrogators did not pursue this issue. Nor were the men, for understandable reasons as potential defen­ dants, eager to volunteer any illuminating comments. With few exceptions the whole question of anti-Semitism is marked by silence. What is clear is that the men's concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. Such a polarization between "us" and "them," between one's comrades and the enemy, is of course standard in war. It would seem that even if the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had not consciously adopted the anti-Semitic doctrines of the regime, they had at least accepted the assimilation of the Jews into the image of the enemy. Major Trapp appealed to this generalized notion of the Jews as part of the enemy in his early-morning speech. The men should remember, when shoot­ ing Jewish women and children, that the enemy was killing German women and children by bombing Germany. If only a dozen policemen stepped out at the beginning to extricate themselves from the impending mass murder, a much

74 1 0 R 0 I N A R Y

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larger number either sought to evade the shooting by less conspicuous methods or asked to be released from the Dring squads once the shooting had begun. How many policemen belonged to these categories cannot be ascertained with any certainty, but an estimate in the range of 10 to 20 percent of those actually aSsigned to the Dring squads does not seem unreasonable. Sergeant Hergert, for instance, admitted excusing as many as Dve from his squad of forty or fifty men. In the Drucker-Steinmetz group, from which the greatest number of shooters was interrogated, we can identify six policemen who quit within four rounds and an entire squad of Dye to eight who were released considerably later. While the number of those who evaded or dropped out was thus not insignificant, it must not obscure the corollary that at least 80 percent of those called upon to shoot continued to do so until 1,500 Jews from J6zef6w had been killed. Even twenty or twenty-Dve years later those who did quit shooting along the way overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion. Given the educational level of these reserve police­ men, one should not expect a sophisticated articulation of abstract principles. The absence of such does not mean that their revulsion did not have its origins in the humane instincts that Nazism radically opposed and sought to overcome. But the men themselves did not seem to be conscious of the contradiction between their feelings and the essence of the regime they served. Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed prol?lems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanc­ tioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, "one whose nerves are

Reflections o n a Massacre 1 7 5

finished, one who is weak. Then one can say: Good, go take your pension. "8 Politically and ethically motivated opposition, explicitly iden­ tified by the policemen as such, was relatively rare. One man said he decisively rejected the Jewish measures of the Nazis because he was an active Communist Party member and thus rejected National Socialism in its entirety. 9 Another said he opposed the shooting ofJews because he had been a Social Democrat for many years. 10 A third said he was known to the Nazis as "politically unreliable" and a "grumbler" but gave no further political iden­ tity. 1 1 Several others grounded their attitude on opposition to the regime's anti-Semitism in particular. "This attitude 1 already had earlier in Hamburg," said one landscape gardener, "because due to the Jewish measures already carried out in Hamburg 1 had lost the greater part of my business customers. "12 Another policeman merely identified himself as "a great friend of the Jews" without explaining further. 13 The two men who explained their refusal to take part in the greatest detail both emphasized the fact that they were freer to act as they did because they had no careerist ambitions. One policeman accepted the possible disadvantages of his course of action "because 1 was not a career policeman and also did not want to become one, but rather an independent skilled crafts­ man, and 1 had my business back home. . . . thus it was of no consequence that my police career would not prosper."14 Lieutenant Buchmann had cited an ethical stance for his refusal; as a reserve officer and Hamburg businessman, he could not shoot defenseless women and children. But he too stressed the importance of economic independence when explaining why his situation was not analogous to that of his fellow officers. "I was somewhat older then and moreover a reserve officer, so it was not particularly important to me to be promoted or otherwise to advance, because 1 had my prosperous business back home. The company chiefs . . . on the other hand were young men and career policemen who wanted to become something. " But

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Buchmann also admitted to what the Nazis would undoubtedly have condemned as a "cosmopolitan" and pro-Jewish outlook. "Through my business experience, especially because it ex­ tended abroad, I had gained. a better overview of things. Moreover, through my earlier business activities I already knew many Jews. "15 The resentment and bitterness in the battalion over what they had been asked to do in J6zef6w was shared by virtually everyone, even those who had shot the entire day. The excla­ mation of one policeman to First Sergeant Kammer of First Company that ''I'd go crazy if I had to do that again" expressed the sentiments of many. 16 But only a few went beyond complain­ ing to extricate themselves from such a possibility. Several of the older men with very large families took advantage of a regulation that required them to sign a release agreeing to duty in a combat area. One who had not yet signed refused to do so; another rescinded his signature. Both were eventually transferred back to Germany. 17 The most dramatic response was again that of Lieutenant Buchmann, who asked Trapp to have him transferred back to Hamburg and declared that short of a direct personal order from Trapp, he would not take part in Jewish actions. In the end he wrote to Hamburg, explicitly requesting a recall because he was not "suited" to certain tasks "alien to the police" that were being carried out by his unit in Poland. 18 Buchmann had to wait until November, but his efforts to be transferred were ultimately successful. The problem that faced Trapp and his superiors in Lublin, therefore, was not the ethically and politically grounded oppo­ sition of a few but the broad demoralization shared both by those who shot to the end and those who had not been able to continue. It was above all a reaction to the sheer horror of the killing process itself. If Reserve Police Battalion 101 was to continue to provide vital manpower for the implementation of the Final Solution in the Lublin district, the psychological burden on the men had to be taken into account and alleviated. In subsequent actions two vital changes were introduced and

Reflections on a Massacre 1 7 7

{ .,

henceforth-with some notable exceptions-adhered to. First, most of the future operations of Reserve Police Battalion 101 involved ghetto clearing and deportation, not outright massacre on the spot. The policemen were thus relieved of the immediate horror of the killing process, which (for deportees from the northern Lublin district) was carried out in the extermination camp at Treblinka. Second, while deportation was a horrifying procedure characterized by the terrible coercive violence needed to drive people onto the death trains as well as the systematic killing of those who could not be marched to the trains, these actions were generally undertaken jointly by units of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Trawnikis, 55-trained auxiliaries from Soviet territories, recruited from the POW camps and usually assigned the very worst parts of the ghetto clearing and deportation. Concern over the psychological demoralization resulting from J6zef6w is indeed the most likely explanation of that mysterious incident in Alekzandr6w several days later. Probably Trapp had assurance that Trawniki men would carry out the shooting this time, and when they did not show up, he released the Jews his men had rounded up. In short, the psychological alleviation necessary to integrate Reserve Police Battalion 101 into the killing process was to be achieved through a twofold division of labor. The bulk of the killing was to be removed to the extermination camp, and the worst of the on-the-spot "dirty work" was to be assigned to the Trawnikis. This change would prove sufficient to allow the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to become accustomed to their participation in the Final Solu­ tion. When the time came to kill again, the policemen did not "go crazy. " Instead they became increasingly efficient and calloused executioners.

9 Lomazy: The Descent of Second Company EVEN BEFORE THE MASSACRE AT J6ZEF6w ON JULY

13,

ORDERS

had already been given for a redeployment of the police battalions in the Lublin district. 1 The district was divided into northern, central, and southern "security sectors. " Reserve Police Battalion 101 was assigned to the northern sector, which encompassed, from west to east, the counties (Kreise) of Pulawy, Radzyn, and Biala Podlaska. Lieutenant Gnade's Second Com­ pany was assigned Biala Podlaska, and Gnade stationed his company staff in the county seat of Biala. First Platoon was divided between Piszczac and Tuczna to the southeast, while Second Platoon was at Wisznice due south. Third Platoon was stationed in Parczew to the southwest, actually in the neighbor­ ing county of Radzyn. 78

t omazy: The Descent of Second Company / 7 9

.,

The Final Solution in the county of Biala Podlaska had commenced on June 10, 1942, when 3, 000 Jews were deported from Biala to Sobib6r. Hundreds of Jews from smaller commu­ nities were concentrated in the village of Lomazy, halfway between Biala and Wisznice.2 Then the murder campaign came to a halt, until the arrival of Lieutenant Gnade's Second Com­ pany. The Jews of Lomazy were to be the target of Reserve Police Battalion IOl's first joint killing action with a unit from Trawniki. Second Company was to provide the bulk of the manpower for the roundup. The primary function of the Trawniki unit was to provide the shooters, thus alleviating the chief psychological burden the German policemen had experienced at J6zef6w. In early August one squad of Third Platoon, some fifteen to eighteen men, was stationed directly in Lomazy under Sergeant Heinrich Bekemeier. * Gruppe Bekemeier, as it was known, passed several uneventful weeks in a town that was half Polish and half Jewish. Though the Jewish population lived apart from the Poles, the Jewish quarter of town was neither fenced nor guarded. 3 The German policemen were housed in the school in the Jewish quarter. On August 16, only one day before the impending action, Heinrich Bekemeier in Lomazy received a telephone call from Lieutenant Gnade informing him that there would be a Jewish "resettlement" the next morning and his men were to be ready at 4:00 a. m. It was "clear" to Bekemeier what this meant. 4 The same day Gnade summoned Lieutenants Drucker and Scheer to Biala. Allegedly in the presence of an SD officer, he informed them of the next day's action, which was to be carried out in cooperation with the SS. The entire Jewish population was to be shot. 5 Second Platoon in nearby Wisznice was provided with trucks for a half-hour ride early in the morning.6 Since no trucks were available for First Platoon, horse-drawn Polish farm wagons were commandeered, and the policemen rode all night to reach Lomazy by early morning. 7 In Lomazy Gnade held a meeting with his noncommissioned

80 l O R D I N A R Y

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officers, who received instructions for clearing the Jewish quarter and assembling the Jews in the schoolyard. The NCOs were told that the Hiwis from Trawniki would do the shooting, so the policemen would for the most part be spared. Nonetheless, the roundup was to be conducted "as had been done before," which is to say that infants and the old, sick, and frail who could not be easily taken to the assembly point were to be shot on the spot. According to one squad leader, however, most children were once again brought to the assembly point. As in J6zef6w, the men encountered not only German Jews but speCifically Ham­ burg Jews during the clearing action. The Jews qUickly filled the schoolyard and overflowed into the adjoining sports field. With some shooting, the roundup was finished in a short two hours.8 The 1,700 Jews of Lomazy were then forced to sit and wait. A group of sixty to seventy young men was selected out, given shovels and spades, loaded onto trucks, and driven to the woods. Several of the young Jews jumped from the moving trucks and made good their escape. Another attacked a German corporal, the battalion boxing champion, who promptly knocked his desperate assailant senseless. In the woods the Jews were set to work digging a mass grave. 9 Back in Lomazy, the wait of the doomed Jews and their police guards stretched into hours. Suddenly a contingent of fifty Hiwis from Trawniki marched into town, led by a German SS officer. "I can still remember exactly, " one policeman testified, "that immediately after their arrival these Trawnikis took a break. I saw that in addition to food they also took bottles of vodka out of their packs and drank from them. " The SS officer and Gnade began drinking heaVily as well. Other NCOs also smelled of alcohol but unlike the two commanders were not visibly drunk. 10 Buttered bread was prepared for the policemen. 11 As the grave digging neared completion and after the Hiwis and policemen finished their meal, the one-kilometer "march to death" in the forest began. 1 2 Some policemen rode the farmers' wagons to the forest, where they set up a new cordon. 13 Others began to march the Jews in groups of200 or 300 at a time. Those

t o mazy: The Desc e n t of Second Company 1 8 1

who collapsed on the way were simply shot. 14 This process proved too slow, and the decision was taken to march all the remaining Jews in a single large group. Pieces of rope were collected from the Polish villagers, tied together, and laid on the ground around the collected Jews. The Jews were then ordered to stand up, lifting the rope that surrounded them, and march toward the forest. Sergeant Toni Bentheim described what followed:

:?

The march proceeded extremely sluggishly. Presumably at the front they went too fast and pulled on the rope, so that at the back end they bunched together in a giant cluster, and scarcely a Jew could put one foot in front of another. Inevitably people fell, and the group had not even left or had just left the sports 6eld when the 6rst ones to fall were regularly hanging on the rope and being dragged along. Inside the cluster people were even trampled. The Jews who fell in this way and lay on the ground behind the column were ruthlessly driven forward or shot. But even these 6rst shots did not alter the situation, and the cluster of people bunched together at the end could not untangle themselves and move forward. As at this point we were without assignment, I alone or with several of my comrades followed the Jews, because I had already concluded that one would never make headway in this manner. When no change was apparent after the 6rst shots, I bellowed loudly something like, "What's the point of this nonsense. Away with the rope. " Due to my shout the entire formation came to a halt, including the Hiwis, who as I remember turned toward me quite perplexed. I shouted at them once again to the effect-they were all armed-that the business with the rope was nonsense. Away with the rope. . . . After my second call the Jews let the rope drop, and the entire group was able to move forward as a normal column. I myself then returned to the schoolyard. Agitated and vexed, I immediately went into the school and drank a schnapps . 15 As the columns of marching Jews reached the forest, they were separated by sex and sent to one of three collecting areas.

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Here they were ordered to undress. Women were allowed to keep their shifts. In some areas the men were totally naked; elsewhere they were allowed to keep their underpants. Police­ men in each area were appointed to collect clothing and valuables. They were warned that they would be searched afterward. The Jews approached with their bundles of clothing, which were laid on a pile and searched. After depositing their valuables in a large container or throwing them onto an open blanket, the Jews were made to lie face down and wait once more, often for hours, while their exposed skin burned under the 16 hot August sun. The preponderance of testimony indicates that Lieutenant Gnade was "a Nazi by conviction" and an anti-Semite. He was also unpredictable-affable and approachable at times, brutal and vicious at others. His worst traits became more pronounced under the inHuence of alcohol, and by all accounts that afternoon in Lomazy Gnade was drunk senseless. In Poland he in fact degenerated into a "drunkard. "17 Gnade's increasing depen­ dence on alcohol was not unusual in the battalion. As one nondrinking policeman noted, "Most of the other comrades drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for 1 such a life was quite intolerable sober. " 8 H Gnade's drinking was commonplace, the streak of sadism he began to display at Lomazy was not. The previous fall Gnade had put his men on the night train from Minsk to avoid becoming involved in the execution of the Jews he had brought there from Hamburg. At J6zef6w he had not distinguished himself from his fellow officers with any especially sadistic behavior. All this changed in the forest outside Lomazy as Gnade sought to entertain himself while waiting for the Jews to finish digging the grave. Even before the shooting began, First Lieutenant Gnade had personally picked out some twenty to twenty-five elderly Jews. They were exclusively men with full beards. Gnade made the old men crawl on the ground in the area before the

t o mazy: The Descent of Second Company / 83

.

grave. Before he gave them the order to crawl, they had to undress. While the totally naked Jews crawled, First Lieuten­ ant Gnade screamed to those around, "Where are my non­ commissioned officers? Don't you have any clubs yet?" The noncommissioned officers went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them. 19 When preparations for the shooting were complete, Gnade began to chase Jews from the undressing areas to the grave. 20 In small groups the Jews were forced to run between a thin cordon of guards some thirty to fifty meters from the undressing areas to the grave. 21 The grave itself had mounds of dirt piled high on three sides; the fourth side was an incline down which the Jews were driven. In their state of intoxicated excitement, the Hiwis initially began shooting the Jews at the entry to the grave. "As a result, the Jews killed first blocked the slope. Thus some Jews went into the grave and pulled the corpses away from the entry. Immediately large numbers of Jews were driven into the grave, and the Hiwis took their positions on the walls that

had been thrown up. From there they shot the victims. "22 As the shooting continued, the grave began to fill. "The Jews who followed had to climb on and later even clamber over those shot earlier, because the grave was filled with corpses almost to the edge. "23 The Hiwis, often with bottle in hand, as well as Gnade and the SS officer, became increasingly drunk. 24 "While First Lieutenant Gnade shot with his pistol from the dirt wall, whereby he was in constant danger of falling into the grave, the SD [sic] officer climbed into the grave just like the Hiwis and shot from there, because he was so drunk he could no longer stand on the wall. " Groundwater mixed with blood began to rise in the grave, so that the Hiwis were soon standing in it over their knees. The number of shooters steadily diminished as one by one the Hiwis fell into a drunken stupor. Gnade and the SS officer then began to scream reproaches at one another loudly enough to be heard by

84 l O R 0 I N A R Y

•

MEN

everyone standing within thirty meters of the grave. The SS officer yelled, "Your shit police don't shoot at all." Gnade retorted, "Good, then my men will have to shoot tOO."25 Lieutenants Drucker and Scheer summoned their NCOs and passed on the order to form firing squads and carry out the executions in the same way as the Hiwis. According to Sergeant Hergert, the NCOs rejected the Hiwis' methods "because the groundwater already stood more than half a meter. Moreover, corpses already lay-to be more precise, floated-all over the grave area. I remember as especially horrifying that large numbers of the Jews who were shot had not been fatally hit during the execution and nonetheless were covered by the follOwing victims without being given mercy shots. "26 The NCOs decided that the execution should continue with two firing squads on opposite sides of the grave. The Jews were forced to lie down in rows along each side of the grave and were shot by the police standing on the opposite wall. Men from all three platoons were formed into squads of eight to ten and were relieved by others in rotation after five or six shots. After about two hours the Hiwis were roused from their stupor and resumed shooting in place of the German policemen. The shooting was finished around 7:00 p.m. , and the work Jews who had been kept aside covered the grave. The work Jews were then shot as well. 27 The thin covering of the overfilled grave continued to move. 28 First and Second Platoons returned to their stations that evening, but Gruppe Bekemeier remained in Lomazy. A few days later it carried out a sweep of the Jewish quarter. Searching the cellars and looking for bunkers dug under the floorboards of the houses, the policemen seized another twenty to thirty Jews. Bekemeier telephoned Gnade, who ordered shooting. Accom­ panied by three or four Polish policemen, Bekemeier and his men took the Jews to the edge of the forest, forced them to lie down, and shot them in the neck froin behind, once again using the bayonet as an aiming guide. Each man shot at least once, some twice. The Polish mayor was ordered to bury the bodies. 29 The massacre at Lomazy-the second four-figure shooting

t omazy: The Descent of Second Company 1 8 5

carried out by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101�iffered from the massacre at J6zef6w in significant ways. On the part of the victims, there seem to have been many more escape attempts at Lomazy,3O presumably because the young, able­ bodied work Jews were not spared and the victims were more aware of their impending fate from the beginning. Despite

'; i.',

greater efforts by the Jews to hide or escape, in terms 'of efficiency the killing procedure was a considerable advance over the improvised and amateurish methods employed at J6zef6w. Roughly one-third as many men killed even more Jews ( 1 , 700) in about half the time. Moreover, valuables and clothing were collected, and the bodies disposed of in a mass grave. Psychologically, the burden on the killers was much reduced. The Hiwis, not just liquored up after the event to help them forget but drunk from the start, did most of the shooting. According to Sergeant Bentheim, his men were "overjoyed" that they were not required to shoot this time.3 1 Those spared such direct participation seem to have had little if any sense of participation in the killing. After J6zef6w, the roundup and guarding ofJews to be killed by someone else seemed relatively innocuous. Even the policemen who did have to replace the Hiwis and shoot for several hours in the late afternoon did not recall the experience with anything like the horror that predominated in their accounts ofJ6zef6w. This time the men did not have to pair off with their victims face to face. The personal tie between victim and killer was severed. In sharp contrast to J6zef6w, only one policeman recalled the identity of a particular Jew he had shot. 32 In addition to the depersonalization of the killing process, through rapid rotation the men were spared the sense of unremitting, endless killing that had been so salient at J6zef6w. Their direct participation in the killing was not only less personal but more finite. Habituation played a role as well. Having killed once already, the men did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time. Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.

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One other factor sharply distinguished Lomazy from J6zef6\:V and may well have been yet another kind of psychological "relief' for the men-namely, this time they did not bear the "burden of choice" that Trapp had offered them so starkly on the occas ion of the first massacre. No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Every­ one assigned to the firing squads took his tum as ordered. 33 Therefore, those who shot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable. This is not to say that the men had no choice, only that it was not offered to them so openly and explicitly as at J6zef6w. They had to exert themselves to evade killing. Even Sergeant Hergert, who was most emphatic that there was no call for volunteers and that virtually every man in the company had to take a tum at shooting, conceded that some men may have "slipped off" into the woods.34 Apparently the number of evaders was quite small, however, for in contrast to J6zef6w, only two men testified to haVing deliberately avoided shooting in some way. Georg Kageler claimed to have been part of a group that had twice escorted Jews from Lomazy to the forest and then "more or less 'slipped away' to escape a further assignment. "35 Paul Metzger· was assigned to an outer cordon at the edge of the forest to block Jews who bolted from the undressing areas and ran for their lives. At J6zef6w, Metzger had "slipped off" among the trucks after two rounds of shooting. Now, at Lomazy, when one fleeing Jew suddenly ran toward him, Metzger let him pass. As he recalled, "First Lieutenant Gnade, who was . . . already drunk by then, wanted to know which sentry had allowed the Jew to run away. I did not report myself, and none of my comrades reported. Because of his drunkenness, First Lieutenant Gnade was unable to investigate the matter, and so I was not held to "36 account. The actions of Kageler and Metzger involved at least some risk, but neither suffered any consequence for his evasion. Most of the policemen, however, seem to have made no effort to avoid

t omazy: The Descent of Second Company / 87

shooting. At Lomazy following orders reinforced the natural tendency to conform to the behavior of one's comrades. This was much easier to bear than the situation at J6zef6w, where the policemen were allowed to make personal decisions concerning their participation but the "cost" of not shooting was to separate themselves from their comrades and to expose themselves as " weak. " Trapp had not only offered a choice but he had set a tone. "We have the task to shoot Jews, but not to beat or torture them, " he had declared.37 His own personal distress had been apparent to all at J6zef6w. Thereafter, however, most "Jewish actions" were carried out in company and platoon strength, not by the full battalion. The company commanders-like Gnade at Lomazy­ and not Trapp were thus in a position to set the tone for the behavior expected and encouraged from the men. Gnade's gratuitous and horrific sadism at the grave's edge was only one instance of how he chose to exercise leadership in this regard, but such examples soon multiplied. When Gnade and the SS commander of the Trawnikis, both still drunk, encountered Toni Bentheim in the Lomazy schoolyard after the massacre, Gnade asked, "Well, how many did you shoot, then?" When the sergeant replied none, Gnade responded contemptuously. "One can't expect otherwise, you're Catholic after all. "38 With such leadership and the help of the Trawnikis at Lomazy, the men of Second Company took a major step toward becoming hardened killers.

10 The August Deportations to Treblinka FAR FROM ANY RAILWAY STATION, LOMAZY WAS A TOWN IN

which Jews had been concentrated in June 1942 but from which they could not be easily deported. Hence the massacre of August 17. Most of the Jews in the northern Lublin district, however, resided in the towns ofRadzyn, Luk6w, Parczew, and Mi�dzyrzec, all proximate to rail connections. Henceforth the major contribution of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to the Final Solution was no longer local massacre but ghetto clearing and deportation to the extermination camp at Treblinka, located some 110 kilometers to the north of the battalion headquarters in Radzyn. The first deportation train to Treblinka left Warsaw late on July 22, 1942, and reached the extermination camp the follOwing 88

The August Deportations to Treb l i n ka 1 89

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The Deportations Resu m e 1 1 07

for lack of space in the trains or to work in cleanup details. When the six-week onslaught was over, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had helped deport more than 27,000 Jews to Treblinka in eight actions and had killed perhaps 1 ,000 more during the roundups and in at least four "mopping up" shootings. What the policemen remembered about each of these actions varied tremendously. The opening operation, the deportation of 2,000 Jews from Radzyn on October 1, was carried out jointly by men from First Company and twenty Hiwis under Untersturm­ fUhrer Fischer. There was apparently little killing on the spot, though the Hiwis fired frequent warning shots to drive the Jews to the train station. ll The following day, October 2, Sergeant Steinmetz's Third Platoon of Second Company completed the liquidation of the Parczew ghetto by shooting�n Gnade's orders-more than a hundred Jews who had apparently been 12 brought there too late for the transfer to Mi�dzyrzec. Thereafter simultaneous deportations were carried out from the two transit ghettos in Luk6w and Mi�dzyrzec by First and Second Companies respectively. Since early September, Lieu­ tenant Gnade had made his new company headquarters in Mi�dzyrzec. To avoid the difficult Polish pronunciation, the men of Second Company referred to it by the apt German nickname Menschenschreck, or "human horror. " Gnade's driver, Alfred Heilmann, * remembered taking the lieutenant one evening to a five-hour meeting in a building on the main square in Mi�dzyrzec that served as the Security Police headquarters and prison. During the meeting, a terrible cry arose from the cellar. Two or three SS officers came out of the bUilding and emptied their submachine guns through the cellar windows . "So now we'll have quiet," one remarked as they reentered the building. Heilmann cautiously approached the cellar window, but the stench was terrible and he turned back. The noise from upstairs increased until Gnade emerged at midnight quite drunk and told 13 Heilmann that the ghetto would be cleared the next morning. The men of Second Company who were stationed in Mi�dzyrzec were awakened around 5:00 a. m. They were joined

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by Drucker's Second Platoon from Komar6wka as well as a sizable contingent of Hiwis. Drucker's men apparently cordoned off the ghetto while the Hiwis and the rest of the Order Police drove the Jews into the main square. Gnade and others used their whips on the assembled Jews to enforce quiet. Some died from the beatings even before the march to the train station began.I4 Heilmann watched while the Jews who had been incarcerated in the cellar prison of Security Police headquarters were hauled out and led away. They were covered with excre­ ment and obviously had not been fed in days. After the required number of Jews had been assembled, they were marched to the train station. Those who could not walk were shot on the spot, and the guards shot ruthlessly into the column ofJews whenever it slowed. IS A small contingent of policemen was already at the train station in order to keep Polish spectators away. Gnade super­ vised the loading of the arriving Jews onto the train. Shooting and beating were employed without restraint to maximize the number ofJews crammed into each cattle car. Twenty-two years later, Gnade's first sergeant made a very unusual confession, given the pronounced reluctance of the witnesses to criticize their former comrades. "To my regret, I must say that First Lieutenant Gnade gave me the impression that the entire business afforded him a great deal of pleasure. "16 But even the most unfettered violence could not overcome the shortage of train cars, and when the doors were finally forced shut, about ISO Jews-mostly women and children but also some men-remained. Gnade summoned Drucker and told him to take these Jews to the cemetery. At the cemetery entrance the policemen chased away the "eager spectators"17 and waited until First Sergeant Ostmann* arrived in a truck with a supply of vodka for the shooters. Ostmann turned to one of his men who had hitherto avoided shooting and chided him. "Drink up now, pfeiffer. * You're in for it this time, because the Jewesses must be shot. You've gotten yourself out of it so far, but now you must go to it." An execution squad of about twenty men was sent into the

The Deportat i ons Res u m e 1 1 09

cemetery. The Jews were brought in groups of twenty, men first and then women and children. They were forced to lie face down near the cemetery wall and then shot from behind in the neck. Each policeman fired seven or eight times. 18 At the cemetery gate one Jew sprang at Drucker with a syringe but was quickly subdued. The other Jews sat quietly awaiting their fate, even after the shooting began. "They were quite emaciated and looked half starved to death," one guard remembered. 19 The number of victims of this Mi�dzyrzec deportation of October 6 and a subsequent one three days later can not be ascertained. Witness accounts vary greatly. 20 In any case, the ghetto was restocked once again in mid-October, when 2, 000 to 3,000 Jews were brought from Radzyii. These Jews were assem­ bled early on the morning of October 14 and loaded onto a caravan of more than a hundred horse-drawn wagons. Guarded by Polish police, ethnic Germans of the Sonderdienst, and a few policemen from First Company, the caravan slowly made its way to Mi�dzyrzec twenty-nine kilometers to the north, arriving after 1 dark. The empty wagons were then returned to Radzyii.2 In subsequent actions on October 27 and November 7, the Mi�dzyrzec ghetto was cleared of all but some 1 ,000 work Jews. These actions must have been smaller than those of early October, for neither Hiwi units nor Security Police from Radzyii were employed to assist the policemen. Gnade was now totally in charge. He apparently introduced one further step in the deportation procedure-the "strip search. " After being assem­ bled in the marketplace, the deportees were driven into two barracks where they were forced to undress and searched for valuables. They were allowed to put only their underclothing back on, despite the cold autumn weather. Scantily clad, they were marched to the train station and packed into cattle cars destined for Treblinka.22 With the conclusion of the November 7 action, units of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had deported at least 25,000 Jews from the city of "human horror" to Treblinka since late August. While Gnade was deporting Jews from Mi�dzyrzec, First

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Company was carrying out parallel actions in Luk6w. Captain Wohlauf was no longer in charge, however. His relations with Trapp had steadily deteriorated, and the major spoke openly of his dismay over the Mi�dzyrzec episode in which Wohlauf had taken his new bride to witness the ghetto clearing.23 After the massacre at Serokomla, Wohlauf had accompanied his wife to Hamburg, where he remained for several days before returning. Back in Radzy6 by mid-October, he became ill with jaundice. In early November his only brother, a Luftwaffe pilot, was killed, and several days later his father died in Dresden. Wohlauf returned to Dresden for the funeral, reported sick, and returned once again to Hamburg for treatment of his jaundice as an outpatient. While recuperating, he learned that his request to be recalled from frontline duty as the only surviving son had been approved. He returned to Radzy6 only briefly in January 1943 to pick up his personal belongings. 24 If Wohlauf had extricated himself from Reserve Police Battal­ ion 101, his men enjoyed no similar respite. Joined by Stein­ metz's men from Lomazy and Parczew (Third Platoon, Second Company) as well as a unit of Hiwis, they carried out two deportations from Luk6w, of 5,000 and 2,000 on October 5 and 8. Memories of the deportations differed drastically. Some claimed that there had been only occasional shots and virtually no killing.25 Others remembered much shooting.26 Indeed, one policeman barely escaped being hit by a stray bullet. 27 The head of the Jewish council, along with other prominent Jews, was killed at the assembly point-the Schweinemarkt, or "hog market"-during the first deportation. Many who hid success­ fully during the first deportation were discovered and deported three days later.28 The conclusion of one policeman that the deportation from Luk6w was "decidedly more orderly and humane" than the August deportation from Mi�dzyrzec reveals little, given the unmatched brutality of the latter. 29 After the initial deportations, Steinmetz's platoon returned to Parczew, and the battalion headquarters was shifted from Radzyn to Luk6w. On November 6, Lieutenant Brand and Sergeant

The Deportations Resume / 1 1 1

Jurich supervised the transfer to Luk6w of the last 700 Jews in Kock. When Jurich discovered that many Jews were missing, he shot the head of the Jewish council on the spot. As in the transfer from Radzyn to Mi�dzyrzec, horse-drawn wagons were used and reached Luk6w only late at night. 30 The concluding deportation of the 3,000 to 4,000 Jews from Luk6w began the next morning (November 7), an operation that continued for several days.31 No longer in any doubt about their fate, the Jews sang, "We are traveling to Treblinka," as they were marched away. In retaliation for the failure of the Jewish ghetto police to report hidden Jews, the Order Police carried out a shooting of forty to fifty Jews. 32 During this final deportation many Jews had apparently been hiding tenaciously. After the trains left, the Security Police employed a ruse to lure the surviving Jews from their conceal­ ment. It was announced throughout the ghetto that new identity cards would be issued. Anyone who reported for his card would be spared; anyone found without one would be shot immediately. Hoping at least for another brief respite between deportations, desperate Jews emerged from their hiding places and reported. After at least 200 Jews had been collected, they were marched outside Luk6w and shot on November l l . Another group was collected and shot on November 14. 33 Members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were caught up in at least one, if not. both, of these final shootings. Because Trapp and the bulk of First Company were apparently elsewhere, Buch­ mann was temporarily without his protector. He and virtually every available man on the battalion staff--clerks, communica­ tions men, and drivers who had hitherto avoided direct partici­ pation in mass executions-suddenly found themselves pressed into service by the local Security Police. In contrast to the blurred recollections of those who by autumn were jaded veterans of many Jewish actions, the memories of shooting Jews in Luk6w were quite vivid for these initiates.34 One policeman recalled that word of an imminent shooting action had already spread the night before.

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On this evening an entertainment unit of Berlin poli�o­ called welfare for the front-was our guest. This entertainment unit consisted of musicians and performers. The members of this unit had likewise heard of the pending shooting of the Jews. They asked, indeed even emphatically begged, to be allowed to participate in the execution of the Jews. This request was granted by the battalion. 35 The following morning Buchmann returned from a meeting and led his men to the Security Police building near the entrance to the ghetto. The policemen took up guard posts along both sides of the street. The iron gate of the ghetto opened and several hundred Jews were driven out. The policemen marched them out of town. 36 More guards were needed for yet another column of Jews. Members of the battalion staff were thereupon ordered to report to Security Police headquarters. A few days earlier they had watched from the windows of the school that had been turned into their lodgings as the Jews of l:.uk6w were marched past on the way to the train station. Now it was their tum to take part. They received a contingent of fifty to a hundred Jews from the Security Police and followed the same route out of town. 37 Meanwhile the first column had turned off the road and followed a path to an open meadow of sandy soil. A SS officer called a halt and told Buchmann's deputy, Hans Prutzmann, * to begin shooting the Jews. Prutzmann formed a firing squad of fifteen to twenty-five men, primarily volunteers from the enter­ tainment unit who had been equipped with guns by the battal­ ion. The Jews had to undress, the men entirely and the women down to their underclothing. They placed their shoes and clothing on a pile and were led off in groups to the execution spot some fifty meters away. Here they lay face down and, as usual, were shot from behind by policemen using fixed bayonets as aiming guides. Buchmann stood nearby with several SS offi­ cers.38 When the men from the battalion staff reached the sandy

The Deportat ions Resu m e / 1 1 3

meadow, the shooting was already underway. Buchmann ap­ proached and told them that they had to provide a firing squad to shoot the Jews they had brought with them. One staff clerk in charge of uniforms asked to be let out. "Because there were children among the Jews we had brought and at the time I myself was a father with a family of three children, I told the lieutenant something to the effect that I was unable to shoot and asked if he couldn't assign me to something else. " Several others immedi­ ately made the same request. 39 Buchmann thus found himself in the same position as Trapp at J6zef6w and basically reacted in the same way. Ordered directly by sup�rior SS officers of the Security Police to carry out a mass shooting of Jews with the Order Police under his command, Buchmann complied. Faced with subordinates who explicitly requested a different assignment, just as he had done at J6zef6w, Buchmann consented and excused four men. As the shooting continued, Buchmann removed himself. In the company of the senior member of the staff contingent, a man whom he knew well and had excused from the firing squad upon request, he walked a considerable distance from the execution site. Some time later communications men and drivers from the battalion staff were ordered to take part in another shooting of Jews collected by the Security Police in Luk6w. This time Buchmann was not present. 40 His numerous requests for a recall to Hamburg had finally been granted. Upon his return he first took a position as an air defense officer. Between January and August 1943 he served as adjutant to the police president of Hamburg. He was then allowed to return to his lumber firm, whose business took him to France, Austria, and Czechoslovakia dUring the last years of the war. Just prior to his release from the Order Police, he had been promoted to the rank of reserve first lieutenant.41 Clearly Trapp had not only protected him from Jewish actions in Poland (with the exception of the Luk6w shooting) but also insured that his personnel file contained a very positive evaluation that in no way damaged his career.

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13 The Strange Health of Captain Hoffmann UNTIL THE FALL OF 1942 THIRD COMPANY OF RESERVE POLICE

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Battalion 101, under Captain and SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Wolf­ gang Hoffmann, had led a charmed existence, largely spared from the killing that was becoming the predominant activity of the other units in the battalion. At J6zef6w two platoons of Third Company had initially been assigned to the outer cordon, and none of its members had been sent to the firing squads in the woods. When the battalion was transferred to the northern security zone in the Lublin district, Second and Third Platoons ofThird Company were stationed in the county of Pulawy. Third Platoon was stationed in the town of Pulawy itself, under Hoffmann's direct command, and Lieutenant Hoppner's Second Platoon nearby, first in Kur6w and then in Wandolin. In the 114

The Strange Health of Capta i n Hoffmann 1 1 1 5

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county of Pulawy the bulk of the Jewish population had already been deported to Sobib6r in May 1942-the first Jews to be killed in that camp-and the remnants of the region's Jewish population were concentrated in a "collection ghetto" in the small town of Konskowola, about six kilometers east of Pulawy. Thus, only Lieutenant Peters's First Platoon, stationed in the neighboring county of Radzyn, had been involved in the August deportations and late September shootings. Nor did the Polish resistance initially disturb Third Company's sojourn in Pulawy. Hoffmann later reported that they had found the county "rela­ tively quiet," and that before October not a single encounter with "armed bandits" had taken place. 1 In early October, however, Third Company's luck ran out. The "collection ghetto" at Konskowola, containing some 1 ,500 to 2,000 Jews, 2 was scheduled to be cleared, like the ghettos in neighboring Radzyn. Northern Lublin was to be judenfrei. A considerable force was assembled for the task: all three platoons of Third Company, including Peters's from Czemierniki; the local Gendarmerie post of some twelve men under First Lieutenant Jammer* (whose main task was to supervise the work of the local Polish police); a roving motorized company ofGendarmerie under First Lieutenant Messmann*; and about a hundred Hiwis and three SS men from Lublin. 3 Third Company assembled in Pulawy, where Hoffmann read his instructions from a piece of paper. The ghetto was to be combed and the Jews collected in the marketplace; those who could not move-the old, frail, and sick as well as infants-were to be shot on the spot. This had been standard procedure, he added, for quite some time.4 The policemen drove to Konskowola. Hoffmann, the senior police officer present, consulted with Jammer and Messmann and distributed the men. In contrast to the usual practice, the Hiwis were assigned to the cordon along with some of the police. The search commandos who initially entered the ghetto were composed of men from both Third Company and Messmann's motorized Gendarmerie. Each commando was assigned a partic­ ular block of houses. 5

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The ghetto had been affiicted by an epidemic of dysentery, and many of the Jews could not walk to the marketplace or even rise from their beds. Thus shooting was heard everywhere as the commandos conducted their first sweep through the ghetto. One policeman recalled, "I myself shot six old people in the dwellings; they were bedridden people who explicitly asked me to do it. '>6 After the first sweep was completed and most of the surviving Jews were collected at the marketplace, the units assigned to the cordon were called in to carry out a search of the ghetto. They had heard the continuous shooting already. As they searched the ghetto, they encountered corpses strewn everywhere. 7 Many of the men remembered in particular the bUilding that had served as the ghetto hospital-in fact nothing more than a large room filled with three or four levels of bunk beds and emitting a terrible stench. A group of five or six policemen was assigned to enter the room and liquidate the forty or fifty patients, most of whom were suffering from dysentery. "In any case almost all of them were extremely emaciated and totally undernourished. One could say they consisted of nothing but skin and bones. "8 No doubt hoping to escape the smell as quickly as possible, the policemen opened fire wildly as soon as they entered the room. Under the hail of bullets, bodies toppled from the upper bunks. "This way of proceeding so disgusted me, and I was so ashamed, that I immediately turned around and left the room ," reported one policeman.9 Another remembered, "At the sight of the sick, it was not possible for me to shoot at one of the Jews, and I intentionally aimed all my shots wide." His sergeant, who had joined in the shooting, noticed his marksman­ ship, for "after the conclusion of the action he took me aside and reviled me as a 'traitor' and 'coward' and threatened to report the incident to Captain Hoffmann. However, he did not do that."l0 At the marketplace the Jews were separated, men on one side, women and children on the other. There was a selection of men between eighteen and forty-five, particularly skilled workers. Possibly some women were selected for work as well. These Jews were marched out of the ghetto to the train station outside

The Strange Health of Capta i n Hoffmann 1 1 1 7

Pulawy, to be shipped to work camps in Lublin. They were in such a weakened condition that many could not make the five-kilometer march to the train station. Witnesses estimated that 500 to 1,000 Jews were selected for labor, but lOO were shot en route after collapsing from exhaustion. 1 1 As the Jews deemed suitable for work were marched out of town, the remaining Jews-800 to 1,000 women and children as well as a large number of elderly men-were simultaneously led off to a shooting site in a woods beyond the edge of town. Peters's First Platoon and some of Messmann's Gendarmerie supplied the firing squads. First the Jewish men were taken into the woods, forced to lie face down, and shot. The women and children followed. 12 One of the policemen chatted with the head of the Jewish council, a German Jew from Munich, until he too was led away at the end. 13 When the policemen who had escorted the work Jews to the train station returned to the marketplace in Konskowola, they found it empty, but they could hear shooting from the woods. They were assigned to make one more sweep through the ghetto, after which they were allowed to break ranks and relax. By then it was late afternoon, and some . of the men found a pleasant farmhouse and played cards. 14 Twenty-five years later Wolfgang Hoffmann claimed to re­ member absolutely nothing of the Konskowola action, in which 1, 100 to 1,600 Jews had been killed in a single day by policemen under his command. His amnesia may have been grounded not only in judicial expediency but also in the health problems he was experiencing during his assignment in Pulawy. At the time Hoffmann blamed his illness on a dysentery vaccine that he had taken in late August. In the 1960s he found it more convenient to trace his illness to the psychological stress of the J6zef6w massacre. 15 Whatever the cause, Hoffmann began to suffer from diarrhea and severe stomach cramps in September and October 1942. By his own account, his condition-oslure on the one hand, or betrayal and shooting on the other, 'tJumy Jews who had fled to the forests during the deportations in ,!()c�tol:>er and November subsequently returned to the reinstated · gnett�:>s of Luk6w and Mi�dzyrzec. The winter weather made in the forests increasingly difficult and precarious; any 1 33

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movement in the snow left tracks, and on at least one occasion frozen feces gave away a Jewish hiding place carved out within a haystack. 2 Thus, when it appeared that the deportations had come to an end, many Jews calculated that they stood a much better chance of survival within one of the permitted ghettos than as hunted prey in the forests. In fact the deportations from the county of Radzyn had ended for the moment, but life in the ghettos of Luk6w and Mi�dzyrzec was not without continuing danger. In Luk6w the SS ghetto administrator, Josef Burger, had 500 to 600 Jews shot in December to reduce the ghetto population. 3 In Mi�dzyrzec 500 Jewish workers in the brush factory who had been spared the fall deportation were deported to the work camp at Trawniki on December 30, 1942. 4 The following night, around 11:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve, Security Police from neighboring Biam Pod­ laska showed up at the Mi�dzyrzec ghetto in inebriated condition and began shooting the remaining Jews "for sport" until the Radzyn Security Police arrived and chased them away. 5 After four months of relative calm, the end came. On the night of May 1, the men of Second Company surrounded the ghetto in Mi�dzyrzec, where they had carried out so many deportations the previous fall. joined once again by a unit from Trawniki, they closed in on the ghetto in the momirig and assembled the Jews in the marketplace. The policemen estimated the number of deportees in this action at 700 to 1,000, though one admitted it was said to have been as high as 3,000 . 6 One Jewish witness estimated 4, 000 to 5,000. 7 Once again the Jews were thoroughly searched and dispossessed in Gnade's undressing barracks and then stuffed into train cars so tightly that 'the doors would barely close. Some were sent to the Majdanek labor camp in Lublin, but most were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka to conclude the so-called fifth action in Mi�dzyrzec. 8 The "sixth action" occurred on May 26, when another 1,000 Jews were sent to the Majdanek camp.9 At that point only 200 Jews remained. Some escaped, but the last 170 were shot by the Security Police on July 17, 1943, in the "seventh" and final

The Last MlIssa c re s : " H arvest Festiva l " 1 1 3 5

" action, after which Mi�dzyrzec was proclaimed judenfrei. On :, May 2, simultaneously with the renewed deportations from Mi�dzyrzec by Gnade's Second Company, SS units from Lublin , along with Ukrainian auxiliaries from Trawniki liquidated the , ghetto in Luk6w, deporting an additional 3,000 to 4,000 Jews to 10 , Treblinka. ' . Many of the men who had come to Poland with Reserve Police " Battalion 101 in June 1942 were gradually reassigned to new , �ks. During the winter of 1942-43, the older men-those born ll ' , before 1891�-were sent back to Germany. At the same time men were culled from each platoon of the battalion and assem, bled in a special unit under Lieutenant Brand. They were sent " back to Zamosc in the southern part of the district to take part in ', the expulsion of Poles from villages as part of Himmler's and • Globocnik's plan for a pure German settlement area deep in , Poland. 12 In early 1943 a group of younger noncommissioned officers from the battalion was reassigned to the Waffen-SS and , $ent to specialized training. 13 Somewhat later Lieutenant Gnade was transferred to Lublin to form a special guard company. He "tl1onlc Sergeant Steinmetz as his deputy. 14 Gnade returned brieHy to Mi�dzyrzec to conduct the May deportations, however. , Finally, Lieutenant Scheer was also reassigned to Lublin, to take command of one of two special "pursuit platoons" (jagdziige) • especially f ormed to intensify the hunt for partisan bands. Some " reinforcements were received to fill the void, especially a group of Berliners to help fill out depleted Second Company. 15 But for " the most part, Reserve Police Battalion 101 remained under­ strength. : . Because of the high rate of turnover and reassignment, only a :, portion of the policemen who had taken part in the first massacre : at J6zef6w were still with the battalion in November 1943, when , its participation in the Final Solution culminated in the great " "harvest festival" (Emtefest) massacre, the single largest German killing operation against Jews in the entire war. With a victim , , total of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district, Emtefest surpassed , , 'even the notorious Babi Yar massacre of more than 33,000 Jews

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outside Kiev. It was exceeded only by the Rumanian massacre of more than 50,000 Odessan Jews in October 1941. Emtefest was the culmination of Himmler's crusade to destroy Polish Jewry. As the murder campaign gained momentum in 1942, Himmler had been plagued with complaints from in­ dustrial and military authorities about the removal of Jewish workers essential to the war effort. In response to such com­ plaints, which he viewed as pure pretense, he agreed to spare some Jewish workers on the condition that they were lodged in camps and ghettos entirely under SS control. This allowed Himmler to parry pragmatic arguments based on the necessities of the war economy while insuring his ultimate control over the fate of all Jews. For in the end, the sanctuary of the labor camps and work ghettos was only temporary. As Himmler said, "There too the Jews shall likewise one day disappear in accordance with 6 the wish of the Fuhrer." 1 In the Lublin district, work ghettos in Mi�dzyrzec, Luk6w, Piaski, Izbica, and Wlodawa had been allowed to continue in existence through the winter of 1942-43. The latter three ghettos were eliminated in March and April 1943; as we have seen, Mi�dzyrzec and Luk6w suffered a similar fate in May. 1 7 Thereafter the only Jews in the Lublin district left alive by German consent were some 45,000 workers in the labor camp empire of Odilo Globocnik. These included a few survivors of the Lublin ghettos, as well as workers sent from the liquidated ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok. By the fall of 1943, two things were apparent to Himmler. First, the work Jews in the camps would have to be killed if his mission were to be completed. Second, over the past six months Jewish resistance had arisen in Warsaw (April), Treblinka (July), Bialystok (August), and Sobib6r (October), when the Jews in those places saw no further hope of survival. Until the spring of 1943, the Jews of Poland had clung to the all too understandable but mistaken assumption that even the Nazis could not be so irrational by utili tarian standards as to kill work Jews making essential contributions to the German war economy. They had

The last Massacres: " Harvest Festiva l " 1 1 3 7

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pursued the desperate strategy of "salvation through labor" as the only hope that a remnant of Jews would survive. This strategy and hope were the crucial preconditions for continuing Jewish compliance. But the Jews were gradually being stripped of their illusions. The Germans encountered resistance when they tried to carry out the final liquidation of the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos, and revolts broke out in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobib6r when the work Jews there realized that the camps were about to be closed. Himmler could not expect to liquidate the Lublin work camps gradually or one by one without encountering further Jewish resistance born of desper:ation. The inmates of the Lublin labor camps would therefore have to be killed in a single massive operation that would catch them by surprise. Such was the genesis of Ernte­

': fest. I8 ,

Mass killing on such a scale required planning and preparation. ' . Globocnik's recent successor as SSPF, Jakob Sporrenberg, trav­ eled to Krak6w, where he consulted with his superior, Wilhelm .... KrUger. He returned with a special folder and began issuing instructions. IS In late October Jewish prisoners were put to work digging trenches just outside the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki, " and Poniatowa. Though the trenches were three meters deep , and one and a half to three meters wide, the fact that they were •. dug in a zigzag pattern gave credence to the claim that they were .., intended as protection against air raids. 20 Mobilization of SS and police units from all over the General Government then began. ; On the evening of November 2, Sporrenberg met with the , commanders of the various forces, which included Waffen-SS · units from the districts of Krak6w and Warsaw, Police Regiment 22 from Krak6w, Lublin's own Police Regiment 25 (including Reserve Police Battalion 101), and the Lublin Security Police, as . well as the commanders of the camps at Majdanek, Trawnoo, and Poniatowa, and Sporrenberg's SSPF staff. The meeting room was full. Sporrenberg gave instructions from the special folder he had brought back from Krak6W.21 The massive killing operation began the next morning. ·

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1 38 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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Members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated in virtually every phase of the Erntefest massacre in Lublin. They arrived in the district capital on November 2 (so Trapp presum­ ably attended Sporrenberg's conference) and were lodged over­ night. Early on the morning of November 3, they took up their stations. One group from the battalion helped to march Jews from various small work camps around Lublin to the Majdanek concentration camp several kilometers from the city center on the main road leading southeast.22 The largest contingent of Reserve Police Battalion 101 took up positions five meters apart on both sides of the angled street that led from the main highway past the commandant's house to the entrance of the inner camp. Here they watched as an endless stream of Jews from various work sites in Lublin filed past. 23 Woman guards on bicycles escorted 5,000 to 6,000 women prisoners from the "old airport camp" where they had been employed sorting the warehouses of clothing collected at the death camps. Another 8,000 male Jews were also marched past in the course of the day. Together with the 3,500 to 4,000 Jews already in the camp, they swelled the victim pool to some 16,500 to 18,000 . 24 As the Jews passed between the chain of reserve policemen into the camp, music blared from two loudspeaker trucks. Despite the attempt to drown out other noise, the sound of steady gunfire could be heard from the camp. 25 The Jews were taken to the last row of barracks, where they undressed. Arms raised, hands clasped behind their necks, totally naked, they were led in groups from the barracks through a hole cut in the fence to the trenches that had been dug behind the camp. This route too was guarded by men from Reserve Police Battalion 101.26 Stationed only ten meters from the graves, Heinrich Bocholt* of First Company witnessed the killing procedure. From my position I could now observe how the Jews were driven naked from the barracks by other members of our battalion . . . . the shooters of the execution commandos, who

The last Massacres: " Harvest Festiva l " 1 1 3 9

sat on the edge of the graves directly in front of me, were members of the SD. . . . Some distance behind each shooter stood several other SD men who constantly kept the mag­ azines of the submachine guns full and handed them to the shooter. A number of such shooters were assigned to each grave. Today I can no longer provide details about the number of graves. It is possible that there were many such graves where shooting took place simultaneously. I definitely remem­ ber that the naked Jews were driven directly into the graves and forced to lie down quite precisely on top of those who had been shot before them. The shooter then fired off a burst at these prone victims . . . . How long the action lasted, I can no longer say with certainty. Presumably it lasted the entire day, because I remember that I was relieved once from my post. I can give no details about the number of victims, but there were an awful lot of them . 27 . Observing the killing from a greater distance was SSPF Spor­ renberg, who circled above the camp in a Fieseler Storch airplane. Poles watched from the rooftops. 28 On the same day and in the same way, other German units massacred the Jewish prisoners at the Trawniki work camp forty kilometers to the east of Lublin (estimates vary from 6,000 to 10,000 victims) and several smaller camps. Still alive were 14,000 Jews at Poniatowa, fifty kilometers west of Lublin, and . 3,000 Jews at camps in Budzyn and Krasnik. The last two were to be spared; Budzyn was producing for the Heinkel aircraft company, and Krasnik for the personal needs of the SSPF Lublin. But the big labor camp at Poniatowa had not been liquidated on November 3 simply because the Germans lacked .. . manpower. However, the camp had been sealed and telephone lines cut so that the events at Majdanek and Trawniki could give no forewarning of what was to happen the follOwing day, November 4. Here too surprise was to be total. In the memories of many of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, the two massacres in the two camps merged into a single operation of two to three days at a single camp, either

1 40 l O R D I N A R Y

M E N

Majdanek or Poniatowa. But some witnesses--and at least one from each of the companies--did in fact remember shooting operations at two campS.29 It seems clear, therefore, that early on the morning of November 4, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 traveled the fifty kilometers west from Lublin to Poniatowa. This time the battalion was not dispersed. The men were stationed either between the undressing barracks and the zigzag graves of the shooting site or at the shooting site itself.30 They formed the human cordon through which the 14,000 work Jews of Poniatowa, stark naked and hands behind their necks, marched to their deaths while the loudspeakers once again blared music in a vain attempt to cover up the noise of the shooting. The closest witness was Martin Oetmold. I myself and my group had guard duty directly in front of the grave. The grave was a big zigzag-shaped series of slit trenches about three meters wide and three to four meters deep. From my post I could observe how the Jews . . . were forced to undress in the last barracks and surrender all their possessions and were then driven through our cordon and down sloped openings into the trenches. SO men standing at the edge of the trenches drove the Jews onward to the execution sites, where other SO men with submachine guns fired from the edge of the trench. Because I was a group leader and could move about more freely, I went once directly to the execution site and saw how the newly arriving Jews had to lie down on those already shot. They were then likewise shot with bursts from the submachine guns. The SO men took care that the Jews were shot in such a way that there were inclines .in the piles of corpses enabling the newcomers to lie down on corpses piled as much as three meters high. . . . The whole business was the most gruesome I had ever seen in my life, because I was frequently able to see that after a burst had been fired the Jews were only wounded and those still living were more or less buried alive beneath the corpses of those shot later, without the wounded being given so-called

The last Massacres : "H arvest Festiva l " 1 1 41

mercy shots. I remember that from out of the piles of corpses the SS [sic] men were cursed by the wounded. 31 The other policemen were long inured to the mass killing of ', Jews, and few were as impressed as Detmold by the Erntefest massacres. What they did find new and impressive, however, ,' , was the problem-hitherto confined to the relative secrecy of the , death camps--of disposing of so many corpses. Wilhelm Geb­ , hardt, * who was part of Gnade's special guard company that , remained in Lublin after the killing, recalled, "In Lublin itself it stank terribly for days. It was the typical smell of burned bodies. Anyone could imagine that a great number of Jews were burned " in the camp at Majdanek. "32 If the inhabitants of Lublin only had to smell the burning corpses at a distance, many members of Third Company had a • much more immediate experience with the disposal of bodies at Poniatowa. As Poniatowa was a mere thirty-five kilometers south , of Pulawy, the men of the company sometimes had occas ion to , go there, and some were in fact assigned to guard the work Jews , who had the gruesome task of disinterment and body burning. The policemen could observe in detail how the bodies were . taken from the trenches, pulled to the burning site by horses, : placed on a grill of iron rails by Jewish workers, and burned. A "bestial stench" dominated the area. 33 A truckload of policemen , once stopped at the camp while the burning was in progress. " "Some of our comrades got sick from the smell and sight of the , half-decomposed corpses, so they had to throw up all over the truck . "34 When Third Company's new commander, Captain , " Haslach, * heard the reports from his returning men, he found , them "unbelievable" and said to First Sergeant Karlsen, "Come, ' , we'll go there and have a look for ourselves . " When they arrived, , the work was already done, but an obliging S S officer showed , them the graves and "burning grill" of iron rails some four by eight meters. 3.5 At the conclusion of the Erntefest massacres, the district of , Lublin was for all practical purposes judenfrei. The murderous '"

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1 42 l O R D I N A R Y

MEN

participation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the Final Solution came to an end. With a conservative estimate of 6,500 Jews shot during earlier actions like those at J6zef6w and Lomazy and 1,000 shot during the "Jew hunts," and a minimum estimate of 30,500 Jews shot at Majdanek and Poniatowa, the battalion had participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews. With the death camp deportation of at least 3,000 Jews from Mi�dzyrzec in early May 1943, the number of Jews they had placed on trains to Treblinka had risen to 45,000. For a battalion of less than 500 men, the ultimate body count was at least 83,000 Jews.

16 Aftermath

WITH THE BATTALION'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE

FINAL SOLU­

"('on complete and the tide of war turning against Germany, the , men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 increasingly found them­ 'selves in action against armed partisans and enemy soldiers. In the spring of 1943 the battalion experienced a rare casualty when First Lieutenant Hagen was killed accidentally by police gun­ fire. In the last year of the war, the toll among the officers ," rose dramatically; Lieutenants Gnade, Hoppner, and Peters fell action, and Lieutenant Drucker returned to Germany ' wounded. l Major Trapp also returned to Germany, in early •. 1944. 2 A few of the men were captured by the advancing Russian army, but most made their way back to Germany as the Third .• Reich collapsed in defeat. " .

1 43

1 44 l O R 0 I N A R Y

M E N

Many resumed their prewar occupations. For the two SS Hauptsturmruhrers, Hoffmann and Wohlauf, as well as twelve from the sample of thirty-two noncommissioned officers, this meant an ongoing career in the police. Another twelve policemen from the rank and file sample of 174 managed to put their reserve service to good use and made a postwar career in the police. Not surprisingly, the interrogations contained little information about the ease with which these twenty-six men continued in the police. While only two of the reservists had been Party membel �, nine of the NCOs had belonged, and three had been in the SS as well. Hoffmann and Wohlauf, of course, had also been in both the Party and the SS. Hoffmann mentioned a brief period of internment by the British due to his SS membership. Though interrogated by Polish authorities, he was released and immedi­ ately rejoined the Hamburg police. 3 Ironically, it was not the hardcore SS officers who suffered postwar difficulties because of Reserve Police Battalion 101's actions in Poland, but Major Trapp and Lieutenant Buchmann. One policeman who had been in the firing squad at Talcyn was denounced by his estranged wife. Under interrogation, he named his battalion commander, Trapp, his company com­ mander, Buchmann, and his first sergeant, Kammer. All of them were extradited to Poland in October 1947. On July 6, 1948, they had a one-day trial in the city of Siedlce. The trial focused solely on the reprisal shooting of seventy-eight Poles in Talcyn, not on any of the battalion's murderous and far more numerous actions against Polish Jews. The policeman and Trapp were sentenced to death and executed in December 1948. Buchmann was sen­ tenced to eight years in prison and Kammer to three." Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not subjected to further judicial investigation until the 1960s. In 1958 the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen (Central Agency for the State Administrations of Justice), headquartered in the town of Lud­ wigsburg just north of Stuttgart, was formed to initiate and coordinate the prosecution of Nazi crimes. The staff of the Zentrale Stelle was organized into various task forces, each

Aftermath 1 1 45

assigned to investigate various "crime complexes. " Only after " they had conducted the initial research into a particular crime complex and discovered the whereabouts of the highest-ranking suspects did they assign jurisdiction to the Office of the State Prosecutor of the federal state in which the prime suspect or '. suspects lived. It was in the course of investigating various crime complexes in the district of Lublin that Ludwigsburg investiga­ tors first encountered several witnesses from Reserve Police : Battalion 101. In 1962 the case was turned over to police and , judicial authorities in Hamburg, where most of the surviving battalion members still lived. From late 1962 to early 1967, 210 former members of the battalion were interrogated, many of them more than once. Fourteen men were indicted: Captains Hoffmann and Wohlauf; Lieutenant Drucker; Sergeants Steinmetz, Bentheim, Beke­ . ' meier, and Grund; Corporals Grafmann* and Mehler*; and five " reserve policemen. The trial began in October 1967, and the verdict was rendered the following April. Hoffmann, Wohlauf, and Drucker were sentenced to eight years, Bentheim to six, Bekemeier to five. Grafmann and the five reserve policemen were declared guilty, but at the judges' discretion-under a provision of the 1940 criminal code that governed the trial, so as to avoid the criticism leveled at the Nurnberg trials of applying ex post facto law-they were given no sentence. Grund, Stein­ metz, and Mehler were not included in the verdict, as their cases had been separated during the trial because of their failing health. A lengthy appeals process finally concluded in 1972. The convictions of Bentheim and Bekemeier were upheld, but they also received no sentence. Hoffmann's sentence was reduced to four years, Drucker's to three and a half years. The case pending • against other members of the battalion was dropped by the prosecution in light of its inability to get sentences against any but three defendants in the first trial. However inadequate the postwar judicial outcome may seem at first sight, it must be kept in mind that the investigation of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was one of the few that led to the ·

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1 46 1 O R D I N A R Y

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trial of any former members of the Order Police. Most of the investigations of police battalions did not even lead to indict­ ments. In the few cases that did come to trial, only a handful of convictions were obtained. Comparatively speaking, the inves­ tigation and trial of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a rare success for German judicial authorities attempting to deal with the police battalions. The interrogations of 210 men from Reserve Police Battalion 101 remain in the archives of the Office of the State Prosecutor in Hamburg. They constitute the prime, indeed indispensable, source for this study. It is to be hoped that the admirable efforts of the prosecution in preparing this case will serve history better than

they have served j ustice.

17 Germans, Poles, and Jews

HE PRETRIAL AND COURTROOM TESTIMONIES OF THE MEN OF

:.."..rvp.

Police Battalion 101 must, of course, be used with IOnl�idlerable caution. Problems of judicial calculation, involVing self-incrimination and incrimination of comrades, weighed upon each witness. The effects of twenty-five years of IDeIIDOI:Y loss and distortion, even when not feigned for judicial were equally important. Psychological defense especially repression and projection, crucially Ia�ld the testimony as well. Nowhere do all these qualifications Ibotlt the reliability of the testimonies become more problematic tlballl in connection with the fateful triangle of German-Polish­ ewi!;h relations. Simply put, the portrayal of German-Polish and

1 47

1 48 l O R D I N A R Y

MEN

German-Jewish relations in these testimonies is extraordinarily exculpatory; in contrast, the portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations is extraordinarily damning. If we begin by examining the first two relationships as described by the former policemen, we can better see the asymmetry and distortion involved in their account of the third. Concerning German-Polish relations, the most salient feature is the scarcity of any comment. The men make general references to partisans, bandits, and robbers, but the thrust of their comments is not the specifically anti-German character of such phenomena. On the contrary, they depict banditry as an endemic problem that predated the German occupation of Poland. Thus, they invoke the presence of partisans and bandits in two ways: on the one hand, to imply that the Germans were protecting Poles from an indigenous problem of lawlessness; and on the other hand, to obscure the frequency and intensity of the battalion's anti-Jewish activities by alleging that partisans and bandits, not Jews, were the chief preoccupation of the policemen. Some of the witnesses referred to specific attempts at main­ taining good German-Polish relations. Captain Hoffmann explic­ itly boasted of friendly relations between his company and the native population in Pulawy. He claimed that he filed charges against Lieutenant Messmann because the "shoot on sight" tactics of the latter's marauding motorized Gendarmerie were embittering the Poles. 1 Lieutenant Buchmann noted that Major Trapp carried out the selection of victims for the Talcyn reprisal shootings in consultation with the Polish town mayor. Care was taken to shoot only strangers and the destitute, not citizens of good standing. 2 This picture of a rather benign German occupation in Poland was contradicted by only two testimonies. Bruno Probst recalled early activities of the battalion in Poznan and L6dZ in 1940-41, when the policemen carried out brutal expulsions and amused themselves with cruel harassments of the local population. He was even more critical of German treatment of Poles in 1942.

Germans, Poles, and J ews 1 1 49

Even at that time denunciations or comments from envious neighbors sufficed for Poles to be shot along with their entire families on the mere suspicion of possessing weapons or hiding Jews or bandits. As far as I know, Poles were never arrested and turned over to the competent police authorities on these grounds. From my own observations and from the stories of my comrades, I recall that when the above-mentioned grounds for suspicion were at hand, we always shot Poles on the spot.3 "�i ,

The second witness to challenge the "rosy" view of German­ �Iiish relations was not a surviving policeman but the wife of iel:lte.naIlt Brand, who had visited him briefly in Radzyn. At the it was quite usual, she said, even for German civilians-to nothing of uniformed policemen-to behave toward the as a "master race. " For instance, when Germans walked a sidewalk in town, Poles were to step aside; when #elmllDS entered a shop, Polish customers were expected to One day her way was barred by some hostile Polish VODlen in Radzyn; she and her companion got away only by ibrE�ate'ninlg to call for the police. When Major Trapp heard of the DClIUeIlt, he was incensed. The Polish women should be shot in public marketplace, he declared. According to Frau Brand, incident was illustrative of the German attitude toward the . In terms of sexual relations between German policemen and women, there were only two references. Hoffmann �lmed to have protected one of his men by not reporting a case venereal disease contracted through forbidden intercourse a Pole.5 Another policeman was not so fortunate. He spent year in a "punishment camp" for Violating the ban on sexual telllLticlns with Poles.6 The very existence of such a ban, of course, a great deal about the reality of German-Polish relations so IlOrlveniemtlly omitted from the bulk of the testimony. Could the German policemen have done to the Poles what did to the Jews? Though on a much smaller scale, the same !)roce!iS of growing callousness and indifference to Polish life

1 50 l O R 0 I N A R Y

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seems to have set in. In September 1942 in Talcyn, the battalion was still cautious about the effect of reprisal shootings of large numbers of Poles. After killing seventy-eight "expendable" Poles, Trapp met his reprisal quota by shooting Jews instead. Bruno Probst recalled a different attitude prevailing by January 1943. As Hoppner's Second Platoon of Third Company was about to go to the movies in Opole, they received reports that a German policeman had been shot by Polish assailants. Hoppner took his men to the village of Niezd6w to carry out a reprisal, only to discover that all but the most elderly inhabitants had fled. Even though word came in the middle of the action that the German policeman had only been wounded and not killed, Hoppner had all twelve to fifteen elderly Poles-mostly women-shot and the village burned down. The men then returned to the movie theater in Opole.7 The testimony is marked by similar omissions concerning German attitudes toward Jews. One reason for this is a stark legal consideration. According to German law, among the criteria ror defining homicide as murder is the presence of a "base motive," such as racial hatred. Any member of the battalion who openly confessed to anti-Semitism would have seriously compromised his legal position; anyone who talked about the anti-Semitic attitudes of others risked finding himself in the uncomfortable position of witness against his former comrades. But this reluctance to discuss anti-Semitism was also part of a much more general and pervasive reticence about the whole phenomenon of National Socialism and the policemen's own political attitudes or those of their comrades during that period. To admit an explicitly political or ideological dimension to their behavior, to concede that the morally inverted world of National Socialism-so at odds with the political culture and accepted norms of the 1960s-had made perfect sense to them at the time, would be to admit that triey were political and moral eunuchs who simply accommodated to each successive regime. That was a truth with which few either wanted or were able to come to grips.

Germans, Poles, and Jews / 1 5 1

. Captain Hoffmann-who joined the Nazi high school student tganizatin at sixteen, the Hitler Youth at eighteen, and both · Party and the SS at nineteen--offered the usual denial of the Ioli.ticaJ and ideological dimension. "My entry into the general in May 1933 is explained by the fact that at that time the SS seen as a purely defensive formation. No special ideologically attitude on my part lay at the root of my entry. "8 :On:sid,erably less dishonest, though still evasive, was the expla­ tati(>n of Lieutenant Drucker, the only defendant who seriously Ltenllpb�d to grapple with the problem of his past attitude. I received National Socialist ideological training only within the framework of training in the SA, and a certain inHuence was present from the propaganda of the time. Because I was a platoon leader in the naval SA and it was desirable at the time that platoon leaders were also Party members, I entered the Party shortly before the outbreak of the war. Under the inHuence of the times, my attitude to Jews was marked by a certain aversion. But I cannot say that I especially hated Jews-in any case it is my impression now that that was my attitude at that time.9 few cases in which policemen testified to the brutality and Ilti··�e:miltism of others usually involved comments about partic­ officers by men from the ranks. With some reluctance, for �tlmc:e, witnesses admitted that Gnade was a brutal, sadistic who was a Nazi and anti-Semite "out of conviction. " sergeants were also the subject of quite negative comments several testimonies. Rudolf Grund, who deputized for Buch­ when the latter was excused from participating in Jewish iltiOiflS, was nicknamed the "poison dwarf' because he compen­ for his short stature by screaming at his men. He was W"llct4�ri,�ed as "especially harsh and loud, " a "real go-getter," a "one hundred and ten percent Nazi" who displayed a zeal for duty. "10 Heinrich Bekemeier was described as a unpleasant man" who proudly wore his Nazi insignia at all

1 52 1 0 R 0 I N A R Y

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times. Disliked by his men, he was especially feared by Poles and Jews, toward whom he was "brutal and cruel. " One of his men recounted how Bekemeier forced a group of Jews near Lomazy to crawl through a mud puddle while singing. When an exhausted old man collapsed and raised his hands to Bekemeier, begging for mercy, the sergeant shot him in the mouth. Heinrich Bekemeier, the witness concluded, was "a common dog. "11 But such denunciations by the policemen, even of unpopular supe­ riors, much less of their comrades, were extremely rare. A range of attitudes toward Jews is revealed in less direct and less guarded statements made during the interrogations. For instance, when asked how they could tell the difference between Poles and Jews in the countryside, some of the men cited clothing, hairstyle, and general appearance. Several, however, chose a vocabulary that still reflected the Nazi stereotype of twenty-five years earlier: the Jews were "dirty," "unkempt," and 2 "less clean" in comparison to the Poles. 1 The comments of other policemen reflected a different sensibility that recognized the Jews as victimized human beings: they were dressed in rags and half starved. 13 A similar dichotomy is reflected in descriptions of Jewish behavior at the shooting sites. Some stressed Jewish passivity, occasionally in a very exculpatory way that seemed to imply that the Jews were complicit in their own deaths. There was no resistance, no attempt to escape. The Jews accepted their fate; they practically lay down to be shot without waiting to be told. 14 In other descriptions the emphasis was clearly on the dignity of the victims; the composure of the Jews was "astonishing" and "unbelievable. "1.5 The few references to sexual relations between Germans and Jews give a picture very different from forbidden romance or even quick sexual gratification between German policemen and Polish women. In cases involving German men and Jewish women, it was a question of domination over the powerless-of rape and voyeurism . The one policeman who was witnessed attempting to rape a Jewish woman was in fact the same man who

Germans, Poles, and Jews 1 1 5 3

later denounced by his wife to Allied occupation authorities, ttralditE:d to Poland, and tried with Trapp, Buchmann, and ammE�r. The witnessing NCO did not report the rapist. 16 The pJlfiU case involved Lieutenant Peters, who would get drunk vodka in the evening and make night patrols in the ghetto. ootted and spurred," he entered Jewish dwellings, tore the covers off women, looked, and then left. By morning he was again. 17 ', For the most part the Jews remained an anonymous collective the German accounts. There were two exceptions. First, the DlitiC' P9litical system, while the unnerved middle classes were IugltJ.t off with the prosperity of rapid economic modernization, atitied by a national unification they had been unable to achieve IVUL1".U their own revolutionrury efforts, and ultimately manipu­ an escalating "social imperialism." 12 According to the cul­ JIlL'lOleOlOgJ.Cal approach, the distorted and incomplete embrace the Enlightenment by some German intellectuals, followed by despair over an increasingly endangered and dissolving tradi­ world, led to a continuing rejection of liberal-democratic valand traditions on the one hand, and a selective reconciliation aspects of modernity (such as modem technology and ends­ rationality) on the other, producing what Jeffrey Herf nTIF,(j a peculirurly German "reactionrury modernism."13 A third exemplified by John Weiss and Daniel Goldhagen, a German Sonderweg in terms of the singular breadth and n1ence of anti-Semitism in Germany, though the former paints a less broad brush than the latter and is crureful to identify the nineteenth-century loci of this German anti-Semitism in pop­ political movements and among the political and academic 14 seems to me that Shulamit Volkov's interpretation of late llet,eeIlth-centtlry German anti-Semitism as a "cultural code" ostjttItes an admirable synthesis of major elements of these dif­ though not totally mutually exclusive, notions of a German mn,p.nllp.u I5 German conservatives, dominating an illiberal politi­ system but feeling their leading role increasingly imperiled by changes unleashed by modernization, associated anti-Semitism everything they felt threatened by-liberalism, democracy, iCiaJisrn, internationalism, capitalism , and cultural experimenta­ To be a self-proclaimed anti-Semite was also to be authoritrur­ nationalist, imperialist, protectionist, corporative, and cultur-

1 96 /

Afterword

ally traditional. Volkov concludes, "Antisemitism was by the] strongly associated with everything the conselVatives stood for. I became increasingly inseparable from their antimodemism. . . . But insofar as the conselVatives co-opted the anti-Semitic issu. from populist, Single-issue anti-Semitic political parties anI enlisted pseudo-scientific and Social Darwinist racial thinking in it support, the conselVatives were embracing an issue in defense 0 reaction that had a peculiarly modem cast to it (not unlike tht simultaneous embrace of naval building). By the tum of the century a German anti-Semitism increasingl) racial in nature had become an integral part of the conselVativt political platform and penetrated deeply into the universities. I had become more politicized and institutionalized than in the west em democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. But thi: does not mean that late nineteenth-century German anti-Semitisrr dominated either politics or ideational life. The conselVatives ane Single-issue anti-Semitic parties together constituted a minority While majorities could be found in the Prussian Landtag to pas� discriminatory legislation against Catholics in the 1870s and in the Reichstag against socialists in the 1880s, the emancipation of Ger­ many's Jews, who constituted less than 1 percent of the population and were scarcely capable of defending themselves against a Ger­ many united in hostile obsession against them, was not revoked. If the left did not exhibit a philo-Semitism comparable to the right's anti-Semitism, it was primarily because for the left anti-Semitism was a nonissue that did not fit into its own class analysis, not because of its own anti-Semitism. Even for the openly anti-Semitic conselVatives, the Jewish issue was but one among many. And to suggest that they felt more threat­ ened by the Jews than, for example, by the Triple Entente abroad or Social Democracy at home would be a serious distortion. If anti­ Semitism was neither the priority issue nor the greatest threat even for conselVatives, how much less was this the case for the rest of German society. As Richard Levy has noted, "One can make a con­ vincing case that [Jews 1 were of very little interest to most Germans most of the time. Putting them at the center of German history in

Afterword / 1 97

nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a highly unproductive �legy. " 16

" For some Germans, of course, Jews were the top priority and )Un�e of greatest fear. The turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism of conservatives fits well Gavin Langmuir's notion of "xeno­ I1Ot)ic' anti-Semitism-a negative stereotype comprised of various that did not describe the real Jewish minority but rather

IJIlt)Olized various threats and menaces that anti-Semites could

and did not want to understandP Langmuir notes as well that

eD()phobic" anti-Semitism provides the fertile soil for the growth

UWllta:StiC or "chimeric" anti-Semitism-or what Saul Friedlander recently dubbed "redemptive" anti-Semitism)8 If Germany's

!POlph()bic anti-Semitism was an important piece of the political

tatt()nn of an important segment of the political spectrum, the

anti-Semites with their chimeric accusations-from

_")11 poisoning of Aryan blood to a secret Jewish world conspir­

behind the twin threats of Marxist revolution and plutocratic

(ml,OCY'aC),-were still a fringe phenomenon. succession of traumatic experiences in Germany between and 1929-loss of control of the Reichstag by the right, mili-

defeat, revolution, runaway inflation, and economic collapse­ German politics. The right grew at the expense of the

�tt�r, and within the former the radicals, or New Right, grew at expense of the traditionalists, or Old Right. Chimeric anti­

�itism grew commensurately from a fringe phenomenon to the

idea of a movement that became Germany's largest political in the summer of 1932 and its ruling party six months later. fact alone makes the history of Germany and German anti­

"U';IU�JlIJ different from that of any other country in Europe. But

this must be kept in perspective. The Nazis never gained

than 37 percent of the vote in a free election, less than the om.birled socialist-communist vote. Daniel Goldhagen is right to

jfUl:ffiU us "that individuals' attitudes on Single issues cannot be

iterrp.n from their votes."19 But it is highly unlikely that he is cor­

in his related assertion that large numbers of Germans who for the Social Democratic Party for economic reasons were

1 9 8 / Afterword

nonetheless of one mind with Hitler and the Nazis about Jews.

While I cannot prove it, I strongly suspect far more Germans voted [

i

Nazi for reasons other than anti-Semitism than Germans who con­ sidered anti-Semitism a priority issue but nonetheless voted for a

party other than the Nazis. Neither the election returns nor any

plausible spin put on them suggest that in 1932 the vast majority of Germans were "of one mind" with Hitler about the Jews or that the

"centrality of antisemitism in the Party's worldview, program, and rhetoric . . . mirrored the sentiments of German culture."20 Beginning in 1933 all the factors that Goldhagen credits with dismantling German anti-Semitism after 1945----education, public

conversation, law, and institutional reinforcement-were operating in the opposite direction to intensify anti-Semitism among the Ger­

mans, and indeed in a far more concerted manner than in the post­ war period. Can one seriously doubt that this had significant impact, particularly given the rising popularity of Hitler and the regime for its economic and foreign policy successes? As William

Sheridan Allen SUCcinctly concluded, even in a highly Nazified town like Northeim, most people "were drawn to anti-Semitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around. "21 Moreover, the 1936 Sopade underground report to which Goldha­

gen repeatedly refers-"antisemitism has no doubt taken root in

wide circles of the population. . . . The general antisemitic psy­ chosis affects even thoughtful people, our comrades as well"22-is

evidence of change in German attitudes follOwing the Nazi seizure

of power in 1933, not the prior situation. Even in the post-1933 period, however, it is best to speak in the

plural of German anti-Semitisms. Within the party, there was

indeed a large core of Germans for whom the Jews were a dire

racial threat and central priority. The hardcore "chimeric" or "redemptive" anti-Semites of the Nazi movement differed in style and preferred response, however. At one end of the spectrum were

the SA and Streicher types lusting for pogroms; at the other end

were the cool and calculating, intellectual anti-Semites described by Ulrich Herbert in his new biography of Werner Best, who advo­ cated a more systematic but dispassionate persecution.23

Afterword / 1 9 9

Hitler's conservative allies favored deemancipation and segrega­ of the Jews as part of the counterrevolution and movement of .mcmai renewal. They strove to end the allegedly "inordinate" ;W""U influence on German life, though this was scarcely a priority to dismantling the labor unions, Marxist parties, and parlia­ aeDltary democracy, or to rearmament and the restoration of Ger­ ....",'. great-power status. They often spoke the language of racial �ti-.semi1jsD[l, but not consistently. Some, like President Hinden­ wanted exemptions for Jews who had proved themselves wor­ through loyal service to the fatherland, and the churches, of ,..•.,"' , wanted exemptions for converted Jews. In my opinion, it is lill (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1989), 116, 174-75. There was a tot:al of 3,000 men in the Sonderdienst for the entire Government. That many were apparently Polish collaborators with • specious claim to ethnic Gennan status can be seen from the fact that 25 percent of them spoke Gennan. Dlensttagebuch, 574. the dates and numbers of Jews killed in the Lublin district, I have upon Yitzhak Arad, BeiZec, Sobib6r, Treblinka: The Operation liilrd lcl Death Camps (Bloomington, Ind. , 1987), 383-87, 390-91; Tati­ ::Bl'1llstin-Berensb�in, "Martyrologla, Op6r I Zagl'ada Ludn6sci ZydowskDistrykcie Lubelskim," BZIH 21 (1957): 56-83; and various Gennan cases. Diemttagebuch, 511 (Polizeisitzung, June 16, 1942). , HoftinannIWohlauf indictment, �. , Johannes R. , HW 1807. For the stationing of the various units of Reserve Police Battalion 101 ��llIt 1942, see HoftinannIWohlauf indictment, 208-12. AJfrled S . , HW 294-95; Albert D., HW 471; Arthur S . , HW 1161; IIdrirh B. , HW 1581-82; Martin D., HW 1598-99; Wilhelm K., HW Herbert R. , HW 2109; Heinrich E., HW 2169; Walter Z . , HW 2622; G. , HW 3300; Ernst N . , HW 1648; August W., HW 2039. ,

234 1 Notes

7.

IN ITIATION TO MASS MURD E R : T H E JOZEFOW MASSACRE

1. As neither Trapp, his adjutant Hagen, nor Lieutenant Gnade survive d to be interrogated in the 19605, the only direct witness to this meeting was Captain Wohlauf. His versions were so numerous and self-serving, and crucial aspects of the rest of his testimony so overwhelmingly contradicted by other witnesses, that he simply cannot be relied on. i. Heinz B., HW 819-20, 2437, 3355, 4414. 3. Julius Wohlauf, HW 4329-30. 4. Friedrich Bm., HW 2091. 5. Hans S., G 328. 6. Bruno D., HW 1874 7. Alfred B., HW 440. 8. Rudolf B., HW 3692. 9. Otto-Julius S . , 1953-54, 4576-79; August W., HW 2041-42, 3298, 4589. S. and W. were the only two witnesses who recalled Trapp's offer in precisely this way. Several others initially remembered a call for volunteers for the firing squad instead (Alfred B., HW 439-40; Franz G. , HW 1189-90; Bruno G., HW 2020). Others, when questioned about the inCident, either conceded the "possibility" that Trapp had made the offer (Anton B., HW 2693; Heinz B . , HW 3356-57, 4415) or at least said they would not contest or deny it had happened. Trapp's stipulation about "older" men appears in S.'s testimony (HW 1953, 4578). W. , who most explicitly confirmed S.'s testimony in other respects, did not mention this qualification and claimed that younger men stepped out as well. However, he does seem to have understood that Trapp made his offer to the older reservists. When asked to explain why he himself did not step out, he indicated that he was a relatively young volunteer, an "active" policeman-i.e. , not a conscripted reservist (HW 2041-42, 4592). The greater precision and vivid detail of the S. and W. testimony and the subsequent behavior of the officers and noncoms of the battalion in accor­ dance with Trapp's offer (i. e., those who belatedly asked out were released from firing squad duty-something the officers and noncoms could never have done so conSistently without the prior sanction of the commanding officer) have persuaded me that a much greater probability rests with their version than with any other. 10. It may well be that First and Second Platoons of Third Company had already been stationed in a cordon surrounding the village before Trapp's speech. None of the men from these two platoons remembered the speech , and one witness (Bruno G . , HW 2020) testified that the two platoons were not present.

Notes 1 23 5 leinrich S . , HW 1563; Martin D. , HW 1596; Paul H., HW 1648; N., HW 1685; Wilhelm K., HW 1767, 2300; Bruno G. , HW 2019;

W., HW 2039; Wilhelm Gb., HW 2147; Heinrich B., HW 2596; Z., HW 2618; Anton B., HW 2656; Ernst Hr., HW 2716; Joseph P. , !742; Kurt D., HW 2888 ; Otto I., HW 3521; Wolfgang H., HW 3565; Z. , G 275; Eduard S., G 639; Hellmut S., G 646; Karl S . , G 657. :Geo'rg G. , HW 2182. �Hellmut S., G 647. "li'riP.d.rich E., HW 1356. BrulllO R. , HW 1852. Harry L. , G 223. !El'JIlSt G., G 383. 1(1., G 363. ,Oskar P., HW 1743. i:rwin G., HW 2503. :Georg K. , HW 2633; Karl S . , G 657. Willhelm K., HW 1769; Friedrich Bm., HW 2091; Ernst Hn., G 506. :otbo.r accounts of the search, see Max D. , HW 1345-46; Alfred L., HW Friederick V. , HW 1539; Friedrich B., HW 1579; Bruno D., HW Hermann W. , HW 1947-48; Otto-Julius S . , HW 1954; Bruno G. , ' ·_'.Ll'; August W. , HW 2040; Bruno R., HW 2084; Hans 1(1., HW 2270; Z., HW 2168-$; Anton B., HW 2687; Ernst Hr., HW 2716; Joseph 2742; August Z. , G 275; Karl Z., G 318; Eduard S . , G 640. " Friedrich B., HW 1579; Bruno G. , HW 2019; August W., HW 2041. , Ernst Hr., HW 2716-17. " W'altt�r Z. , HW 2618. For confirming testimony, see Anton B., HW Joseph P., HW 2742. Hermann W., HW 1948. " Ernst Hn., G 507. Two witnesses (Eduard S . , G 642; Hellmut S., G remembered the first sergeant but not the doctor. August W., HW 2042. Martin D., HW 1597. Anton B. , HW 2658-59. Heinz B., HW 821-22. Not a single policeman interrogated in !lDburg had been part of the escort, so Buchmann's account is the only of the fate of the work Jews. On the Luxembourgers making up escort, see Heinrich E., HW 2167. For other accounts of the sorting workers and their being marched out of J6zef6w by Buchmann, see K., HW 1768; Hermann W., HW 1948; Friedrich Bm., HW Ernst Hn., G 507. For the testimony of First Company shooters, see especially Friedrich ·

·

·

·

236 1 Notes B., HW 1580-81; Friedrich Bm., HW 2091-93; Ernst Hn., G 507-1 Heinrich R. , G 623; Hellmut S., G 646-47; Karl S . , G 658-59. 33. Paul H . , HW 1648-49. 34. Heinrich H., G 453. 35. Wilhelm I., HW 2237. 36. Friedrich Bm., HW 2092. 37. Hellmut S . , G 647. 38. Heinrich BI, HW 462. 39. Hermann W., HW 1948. 40. Alfred L. , HW 1351. 41. Bruno R. , HW 1852.

42. Erwin N., HW 1686. 43. Bruno D., HW 1870; Anton B., HW 4347; Wilhelm Gb., HW 436.: Paul M . , G 202. 44. Ernst Hr., HW 2717. 45. Erwin G., HW 1640, 2505. 46. Friedrich Bm., HW 2092. 47. Wilhelm G., HW 2149. 48. Ernst Hr., HW 2718. 49. Wilhelm Gb., HW 2538. SO. Ernst Hr., HW 2719. 51. Ernst Hr., HW 2720. 52. Wilhelm Gb., HW 2539, 2149. 53. Erwin G., HW 163�40, 2504; Alfred B., HW 2518. 54. Anton B., HW 4348. See also Max D., HW 2536. 55. Walter Z. , HW 261�20; Erwin G . , HW 4345. 56. Heinrich S . , HW 1567, 4364; Georg K., HW 2634 57. Joseph P., HW 2743-45. 58. Paul M . , G 206-7. 59. Gustav M . , G 168. 60. Hans D., HW 1336, 3542. 61. Walter N . , HW 3926, G 230. 62. August Z. , G 277. 63. Georg K., HW 2634 64. Otto-Julius S . , HW 4579; Friederick V., HW 1540. 65. Rudolf B., HW 2434, 2951, 4357. 66. Franz K., HW 2483-86. 67. In addition to the above cases, another policeman who asked to 1>< released when his nerves were finished after a few rounds was Bruno D. HW 1876, 2535, 4361. 68. Erwin G . • HW 2505; confirmed by Rudolf K., HW 2646-47. .

.

Notes 1 2 3 7

Anton B., HW 2691-93, 4348. Willy R. , HW 2085. Alfred B., HW 440; Walter Z. , HW 2621; Georg K., HW 2635; August G 278. Friedrich B., HW 1581. Julius Wohlauf, HW 758. · Heinrich B., HW 2984. Alfred B., HW 441. August W., HW 2042. Otto-Julius S., HW 1955. Witness after witness used the terms erschiitterl, deprimlerl, verbit­ niederge8chiagen, bedriickt, ventorl, empOri, and belastet to describe men's feelings that evening. Friedrich Bm., HW 2093; Hellmut S., G 647. Heinrich Br., HW 3050. Wilhelm J. , HW 1322. Willy S., HW 2053. See also Wolfgang Hoffmann, HW 774-75; IaIlnes R. , HW 1809; Bruno R., HW 2086. Karl M . , HW 2546, 2657. Friedrich Bm. , HW 2093-94. See also Karl G. , HW 2194. ·

· ·

8.

REF LECT I O N S O N A MASSAC RE

Heinz B., HW 4413; Kurt D., HW 4339. In her analysis of Polish rescuers, Nechama Tec also notes that the decision to help Jews was impulsive and instinctive, not the result of iIon:ged reHection and calculation. When Light Pierced the Darkness: riltian Rescue ofJews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York, 1986), 188. Anton B. , HW 2693. Bruno D., HW 2535, 2992. August W., HW 4592. Erwin G., HW 1640, 2505, 4344. · Friedrich M., HW 1708. IMT 29:151 (1919-PS). Karl G., HW 2194. . Hans Pz. , HW 3938. Hero B., HW 890. Arthur S., HW 1165. Hermann W. , HW 1947. Gustav M., G 169-70. Heinz B., HW 2439-40. ·

238 1 Notes 16. Heinrich Br., HW 3050. 17. Heinrich R. , G 624; August W., HW 3303. 18. Heinz B., HW 647, 822, 2438 , 3940-41.

9. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

303.

-lOMAZY: T H E D E S C E N T OF SECON D COMPANY

YVA, 0-531121127-31 (order of Kintrupp, KdO Lublin, July 9, 1942) . Brustin-Berenstein, table 2. Kurt D., HW 1230, 4368; Anton B. , HW 4371. Heinrich B., HW 2600, 2985. Kurt D. , HW 1230, 1232, 2892, 4368; Ernst Hr., HW 2732. Paul M . , G 007. Max F., HW 1387; Ernst Hr., HW 2722; Walter L. , G 184; Fritz S., C

8. Anton B., HW 2698-99, 4371; Ernst Hr. , HW 2722; Wolfgang H., HW 2211; Kurt D., HW 4368; August Z., G 273. 9. Fritz S., G 303-4. See also Bernhard S., HW 1717; Ernst Hr., HW 2723; Heinrich B., HW 2985; Friedrich P., G 240. 10. Ernst Hr., HW 2723; Joseph P., HW 2749--50; Walter L. , G 185; Paul M., G 208. 11. Gustav M . , HW 1709. 12. For the phrase, Max F., HW 1386; for the distance, Heinrich B., HW 2601; Walter L., G 185. 13. Max F., HW 1386; Paul M . , G 007. 14. Walter Z., HW 2624; Georg K. , HW 2638; Anton B., HW 4372. 15. Anton B., HW 2700-2701. 16. Wilhelm Gb., HW 2150; Karl G., HW 2197; Heinrich B., HW 2600 Georg K., HW 2638; Joseph P., HW 2750; Hermann Bg., G 98; Walter L. , G 185; Paul M . , G 207; August Z., G 282; Fritz S., G 313. 17. Kurt D., HW 4335, 4368-70; Anton B., HW 2703, 3960, 4348; Josepl P. , HW 2.750; Henry D . , HW 3071; Walter N., HW 3927; Ernst Hr., HW 3928; Heinz B., HW 3943; Walter Z. , HW 3954. The only contra!') testimony about Gnade is Ernst Hr., HW 3929; Walter Z. , HW 3954; anc Wolfgang Hoffmann, HW 4318. 18. Wilhelm I. , HW 2239. 19. Friedrich P. , G 241-42. This account is fully confirmed by August Z.o HW 3519. 20. Hermann Bg., G 98; Joseph P., HW 2750. 21. Walter Z . , HW 2625; Georg K., HW 2638. 22. Friedrich P., G 241-42. 23. Ernst H., HW 2725.

Notes 1 2 39

' Johannes R. , HW 1810; RudoIf K. , HW 2650; Joseph P., HW 2750-51; D., HW 4368; Paul M . , G 209. . Ernst Hr. , HW 2725-26. Ernst Hr., HW 2256. � Ernsl Hr., HW 2256-57; Kurt D., HW 4368; August Z. , G 282; Joseph HW 2750-51; Walter L. , G 186-87; Max F. , HW 1388. Bernhard S . , HW 1717. Rudolf B., HW 405; Bruno D., HW 2535; Heinrich 8., HW 2613-14; Z. , HW 3365---00, G 284. Fritz S . , G 303-4; Paul M . , G 209; Bernhard S., HW 1717. Anton B., HW 4374. August Z., G 282. Ernst Hr., HW 2727-28; August Z., G 284. Ernst Hr., HW 2727. Georg K., HW 2638. Paul M . , G 206, 209. Adolf B., HW 441. Anton B., HW 2703-4.

1 0.

T H E AUGUST DEPORTAT I O N S TO TREB L I N KA

Heinrich S . , HW 1569. Georg K. , HW 2637; Joseph P. HW 2747. Erwin G., HW 1642, 2507. Hans K. , HW 2251; Georg K., HW 2636. On First Company's role as the "search troops," see Paul H . , HW 1652; K. , HW 2251. For the parczew deportations in general, see Heinrich S . , HW 156�73, Erwin G., HW 1641-42, 2507; Paul H . , HW 1652; Bruno D. , HW 77; Heinrich E., HW 2170; Otto H . , HW 2220; Hans K. , HW 2251-52; D., HW 2536; Heinrich B., HW 2608; Georg K. , HW 2636; August Z. , 3366, G 278-79; Alfred K., G 575-76. Heinrich S . , HW 1572. Steinmetz's admission was the exception. It was more common, of course, for the policemen to deny under interrogation they had any notion about the impending fate of the deported Jews. Heinrich B . , HW 2608; August Z., G 279. In the memories of almost all the policemen. the August deportation Mi�dzyrzec was telescoped into a single day. However, one policeman lein:rich R. , G 626) and all the Jewish witnesses (Tauba T. , HW 1066-67; C. , HW 1092; Rywka G., HW 1112; ZStL, 8 AR-Z 236160 [investigation Aussenstelle Radzyn], 1:3-4 [excerpt from Feigenbaum]) remember •

240 1 Notes a two-day action . Given the number of Jews deported, two days were almost certainly needed. 10. YVA, TR-IMlO (Landgericht Dortmund, 8 Ks 1170 judgment against Josef Biirger), 16. 11. Policemen from both First and Third Companies testified that Second Company also took part. However, outside of Tbird Platoon, not a single member of Second Company-even those who testified quite frankly about Lomazy and J6zef6w-remembered the August Mi� deportation. I consider it most likely, therefore, that First and Second Platoons of Second Company were not present on this occasion. 12. Ernst Hn., G 512; Heinrich R. , G 625. 13. Heil ich H . , HW 976, 3219. See also Friedrich B . , HW 1582, 3529; Hans K. , 2252, 3220. .•

14. H. evaluations of December 6, 1940, and March 31, 1941, in HW 565-67. 15. R. evaluation of April 10, 1941, in HW 569. 16. Trapp evaluation of July 21, 1941, in HW 574-80. 17. Hans Pg. , HW 1945; Ernst Hr., HW 2713. 18. Heinrich E . , HW 3351, 3354. 19. Heinz B., HW 4414. 20. Julius Wohlauf, HW 750-51, 760. 21. Friedrich B . , HW 1582; Friedrich Bm. , HW 2099; Heinz B. and Arthur K. , HW 3357; Ernst R. , G 610; Heinrich R. , G 627. 22. The most detailed accounts of the Mi� deportation are Heinrich H . , HW 976-78; Friedrich B . , HW 1582-83; Hans K., HW 2253-54; Ernst Hn., G 512-13; Ernst R. , G 610-12; Karl S . , G 659-60. 23. Hans K. , HW 2253. 24. Karl S . , G 659.

25. Heinrich R. , G 610. 26. Friedrich B . , HW 3529. 27. Friedrich B., HW 1583; Ernst Hn., G 512. 28. Heinrich H . , HW 978, 3219; Hans K. , HW 3220; Ernst R. , G 611. 29. Heinrich H . , HW 977; Friedrich B . , HW 1584; Hans K., HW 2254; Ernst Hn. , G 513; Ernst R. , G 612. 30. Heinrich H . , HW 977-78. 31. lise de L., HW 1293. 32. Heinrich H., HW 978; Hans K. , HW 2254. 33. Berl C., HW 1091. 34. YVA 0-53110511 11 (reports of the Warsaw Judenrat). 35. ZStL, 8 AR-Z 236160 (investigation of KdS Aussenstelle Radzyn) 3:464 (Ostbahn travel plan of August 25, 1942). For more on the breakdown at

Notes 1 2 4 1 rebllinlca, see Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (London, 1974), 156-64; 89-96, 119-23.

11.

LAT E - S EPTEM B E R SHOOT I N G S

Ferdinand H . , HW 3257-58. Hans K. , HW 2256. The most important testimony for the Serokomla shootings is Friedrich HW 1586-89, 3534; Hans K. , HW 2256-60; Ernst R. , G 612a-b; Karl G 661-62. Friedrich P. , HW 3534. Hans K. , HW 2258. Albert D. , HW 3539; Arthur S., HW 3540.

Heinrich BI., HW 464; Hans K. , HW 2255; Friedrich Bm. , HW 2096. Heinrich E . , HW 2173. Hans K. , HW 2256. Ernst Hn. , G 509. Ernst Hn., G 509; Friedrich B . , HW 1590. Heinz B., HW 826. Georg W., HW 1733. Gerhard H . , G 541. Hans K. , HW 2255; Friedrich Bm. , HW 2097; Hellmut S . , G 648. Alfred H., HW 286. Heinrich BI. , HW 464-65. Friedrich Bm., HW 2097-98; Hans K . , HW 2255--56; Hellmut S . , G M--ill; Karl S . , G 662. Trapp report to Police Regiment 25, September 26, 1942, HW Heinz B. , HW 648, 822, 824, 2438, 2440-4 1 , 3941, 4415. Heinrich E . , HW 2172. Hans K. , HW 2242; Kurt D., HW 2678; Arthur S . , HW 3539; Alfred G 582; Ernst R., G 612